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98 entries categorized "Journalism-Ethics"

January 16, 2012

Arrest for North Korean's Who Insufficiently Mourned at Funeral of Kim?: Unlikely Media Hype

By Nate Thayer

The story that North Korea has launched a sweeping campaign arresting and punishing people who didn’t mourn sufficiently at the death of Kim Jung Il has gone viral, published in virtually every major media outlet worldwide. Headlines all had a common theme: “Six months in labor camp for N. Koreans who didn’t cry at despot’s funeral” and “North Korea reportedly punishing insincere mourners” and even “If You Didn't Cry Like a Maniac for Kim Jong-Il, You're Going to Prison” (New York Magazine).

But there is one problem: There is no remotely credible evidence it is true. Every single published report can be traced back to a single unidentified, unnamed North Korean source in a remote province quoted by a single South Korean website on January 11. The website, the Daily NK, is comprised of North Korean defectors who, for obviously legitimate reasons, rarely names contacts it quotes from within a country where unauthorized talking—little less criticism—to a foreign reporter means certain harsh imprisonment at best. But the Daily NK also has a history of loose commitment to accuracy and a very defined political agenda. It advocates the overthrow of the North Korean government. A Google search will show 1,700.000 hits since this particular story was posted four days ago. Every major wire service from the AP, Reuters, AFP, Kyodo, to the Washington Post, The Financial Times and on down to papers and broadcasters from Peoria to Harare and thousands of obscure web sites and blogs have run the story with a smirk and no attempt at corroborating its accuracy.

It is an interesting case study on how the world’s uncensored free press sometimes operates. When it comes to North Korea, it is virtually impossible to further blacken their self created reputation of outrageous violations of human dignity and buffoonish bizarre behavior. The DPRK has created a self inflicted scenario where virtually anything that is written about the carefully orchestrated public image of the country is believable. Only last week, as one of many examples, the North Korean government reported that the new leader, Kim Jong Un, learned to drive a car at age three and could drive 75 kilometers an hour on dirt roads by age eight.

But that doesn’t absolve the legitimate media from responsibility for running a story fully aware with a cursory check had entirely insufficient sourcing to merit republishing—however cleverly they phrased the report to distance culpability for spreading what as likely was intentional disinformation as a factual story.

So despite the serious-as-cancer story of the reality of a North Korea now run by a small group of thugs more resembling a neighborhood based mafia organized crime gang than a government with the 4th largest standing army on the planet armed with nuclear weapons, reporting on North Korea has a high degree of voyeuristic entertainment value. It isn’t the demise of the leader of a significant country that has grabbed headlines these past weeks, but rather the cartoonish spectacle of their hard to fathom antics.

The original source of the story, the Daily NK on January 11, read, at its most substantive: “The North Korean authorities have completed the criticism sessions which began after the mourning period for Kim Jong Il and begun to punish those who transgressed during the highly orchestrated mourning events. Daily NK learned from a source from North Hamkyung Province on January 10th, “The authorities are handing down at least six months in a labor-training camp to anybody who didn’t participate in the organized gatherings during the mourning period, or who did participate but didn’t cry and didn't seem genuine.”

Every single news story that picked it up and spread it around the world, will lead back to this single uncorroborated, unidentified paragraph. It is a case of a story being too good not to run with by letting the known facts interfere. North Korea reacted yesterday on their official news site, KCNA: “The noble blood and tears of our people have been blasphemed by spurious claims of coerced sadness and stage-management,” adding, “The propaganda…is reaching a level that can no longer be tolerated.”

Referring to the international media as “the reptilian press” (their English translation is regularly rather erudite and clever in its evocativeness) who were “hell-bent on slinging mud with collections of the world's worst invectives, deserves the severest punishment by justice and truth.”

The official Korean Central News Agency continued: “The noble blood and tears of our people have been blasphemed by spurious claims of coerced sadness and stage-management,” and spat vitriol at the free press as “not content with this, they released such misinformation touching off towering resentment that ‘those who failed to show tears at memorial services were sent to a concentration camp and the military was ordered to kill three generations of those who attempt to defect to the south.’”

The DPRK characterized the world free press as “Intolerable is the hair-raising behavior of the depraved who ceased to live under the same sky” who are “are pitiable human scum” and that North Korea “feel(s) towering hatred as well as redoubled conviction of victory when seeing this sorry sight of the hostile forces.” KCNA concluded: “We will bring punishment to generation after generation of the gang of traitors that will make them shudder” and their armed forces “will as ever consolidate their single-minded unity in every way no matter what others may say and dynamically advance only along the chosen road.”

In this case, North Korea may have a legitimate reason to be a bit perturbed. The non-North Korean press were doing exactly to its own audience what the DPRK does as policy: Knowingly mislead it’s audience.

December 21, 2011

North Korea: A Glimpse at a Simple Criminal Syndicate Posing as a Government

By Nate Thayer

(Copyright Nate Thayer. No republication in part or in whole allowed without prior wirtten permission of the author)

After a decade of failed Clinton era diplomacy, the United Nations and both the Bush and Obama administrations shifted to a more confrontational policy regarding the PDRK, from negotiations on stopping the North Korean program for nuclear and missile development, to increased confrontation over their state sponsored criminal activity and financial sanctions directed to punish the North Koreans for weapons development. This evolved to a collapse of all diplomatic negotiations whatsoever in 2009.

The US and its allies have essentially been left bewildered and have little strategic policy towards the PDRK at all. International policy towards North Korea currently is labelled one of "Strategic Patience", a euphamism, after exhausting all obvious paths, since 1985, of engaging the worlds most stark threat to regional and international peace, which has left the world community at a loss of what to do next. And currently having no strategic policy at all.

Since President Clinton left office in January 2001 until the present, there has been a marked escalation of hostility between the two sides that has reached a complete breakdown in diplomatic negotiations over the development of the PDRK nuclear and other military program. The U.S. and the United Nations, South Korea, Japan, the European Union and a number of other countries have created laws, resolutions, and Presidential Executive Orders to mitigate the effectiveness of some of the North Korean international criminal network and its military programs of acquiring nuclear weapons and exporting sophisticated weapons.

In September 2005, the Bush administration used provisions of the Patriot Act, which was made law in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attack in the United States, and provisions of the Bank Secrecy Act, an amendment to the Patriot Act, to sanction and seize assets of financial institutions linked with North Korean illegal activities in Macau.

The North Koreans responded by exploding a nuclear bomb in a test demonstration of its nuclear capablity.

In October 2006 UN security Council passed unanimously resolution 1718 imposing a series of harsh economic and commercial sanctions on North Korea after the DPRK conducted tests of a nuclear bomb earlier that month. The UN resolution demanded the DPRK halt its nuclear program and ballistic missile program, authorized the boarding and inspection of all DPRK cargo ships for weapons of mass destruction, banned imports and exports of a wide range of military equipment, deemed that all North Korean companies and individuals engaged in banned DPRK weapons programmers could have their assets frozen, and called for the “return immediately to the six-party talks without precondition”

North Korea released an official statement contending it’s “nuclear test was entirely attributable to the US nuclear threat, sanctions and pressure,” and “was compelled to substantially prove its possession of nukes to protect its sovereignty.” North Korea’s UN Ambassador, Pak Gil Yon, said in reaction “If the United States increases pressure on the Democratic People Republic of Korea, the DPRK will continue to take physical counter measures considering it as an act of war.”

In June of 2008, Bush declared “a national emergency” saying North Korea threatened U.S. security and interests and issued an executive order based on provisions of the Trading with the Enemy Act and the Patriot Act. He cited "the proliferation of weapons usable fissionable material on the Korean peninsula constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

In September of 2005 the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, an interagency task force under the Department of the Treasury was created to combat DPRK illicit international activities.

In June of 2009, after North Korea’s long range missile tests and another underground nuclear tests earlier that year, the United Nations Security Council issued more sanctions on the DPRK which “bans all arms transfers from North Korea. The resolution “ targeted not only North Korean financial institutions, but key individuals associated with nuclear, ballistic missile, and other WMD related programs.”

President Obama’s 2010 executive order was specific and direct saying it “targets the government of North Korea’s continued involvement in a wide range of proliferation and other illicit activities…for sanction individuals and entities facilitating North Korean Trafficking in arms…and engagement in illicit economic activities, such as money laundering, the counterfeiting of goods and currency, bulk cash smuggling and narcotics trafficking. This new executive order supplements existing sanctions targeting proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and those who support them, under which North Korean entities have been designated to date.”

The Congressional Research Service has said US policy can help reverse the DPRK dependence on its illicit economy by “balancing US interest where foreign policy goals may conflict with anti crime activities. Congress may also be asked to provide funding for energy and food assistance as part of the resolution to the DPRKs weapons program, because some contend that additional supplies of energy and food could reduce the need to rely on illicit activities in some North Korean quarters.”

Here is a glimpse of what the PDRK has been doing concommitently to the international diplomatic effort;

Drug Trafficking

Profit estimates vary widely for the North Korean drug trade. Estimates range from 100 million dollars to nearly a billion dollars from the combined production, manufacture, and sale of opium, heroin, and methamphetamines. In 2004, more sober estimates were 200 million dollars from the combined heroin and methamphetamine trade, in addition to 500 million dollars from other criminal organized crime. Lower figures can reach 71 million dollars----59 million for heroin and opium and 12 million from amphetamine. Counterfeit brand name cigarettes are estimated to have a retail value of between 560 and 720 million dollars annually from their manufacture and export And some U.S. government figures estimate they make more than 500 million dollars a year in the export of weapons systems and components, including the transfer of nuclear technology and expertise.

However, it appears that the extraordinary high profile of DPRK official involvement in narcotics trafficking, particularly with the arrest, detention, and expulsion of diplomatic, military, and intelligence officers and officials connected to the government, has led the North Koreans to seek out middlemen in private organized crime syndicates to help distribute the illicit products. These include Japanese, Chinese, other Asian, Russian, and European crime syndicates that distribute their illicit narcotics, cigarettes, counterfeit currency and pharmaceuticals, and even weapons.

For at least the last 35 years, officials of the DPRK and other North Korean government operatives have been apprehended for trafficking in narcotics. Since 1976 there have been at least 50 arrests and drug seizures involving North Korean officials in more than 20 countries around the world, said William Bach, a U.S State Department official, in May 2003, “And more recently there have been very clear indications especially in the form of methamphetamine seizures in Japan that North Koreans traffic and probably manufacture methamphetamine drugs.”

The State Department’s annual International Narcotics Country Report released March, 2003 concludes that ”for years during the 1970s 1980s and 1990s, citizens of the DPRK, many of them diplomatic employees of the government were apprehended abroad while trafficking in narcotics……more recently, police investigation of suspects apprehended making large illicit shipments of heroin and methamphetamine to Taiwan and Japan have revealed a North Korean connection to the drugs."

Suspects arrested in several countries revealed to authorities direct links with North Korean officials, military vessels and personnel in drug and other illicit trafficking. Defector accounts also confirm government control over opium production, and the manufacture of heroin and methamphetamine by PDRK state entities. “ The most profitable means of state sponsored illegal business remains drug trafficking, gold smuggling, illegal sale and distribution of endangered species, trafficking in counterfeit us currency, and rare metals,” said Raphael Pearl of the independent Congressional Research Service in 2006, “North Korean officials appear to be increasing their involvement in financing (these activities)”

Methamphetamine production in North Korea was said to have started in the mid 1990’s. In the late 1990’s North Korea tried to purchase between 20 and 50 tons of ephedrine—the precursor drug for methamphetamines—from several countries, including an Indian pharmaceutical company. That is enough to treat 135 million colds for a country with a population of 23.9 million people.

Japan has been a particular target for North Korean drugs. In 1999, two separate seizure of 100 kilograms and 564 kilograms of methamphetamine was seized. In 2000, 250 kilograms of methamphetamine seized, in 2001 a North Korean military ship was sunk by a Japanese patrol boat suspected of attempting to smuggle in drugs, and in 2002 separate seizures of 150 kilograms and two packages containing 500 pounds of methamphetamine said to be from North Korea discovered floating onshore. And in 2003 the Australian authorities seized a North Korean ship near the coast off Melbourne with 125 kilograms of heroin and arrested it’s North Korean crew. The ship tried to flee Australian navel vessels for four days and was holding no other cargo. Included onboard was a Korean Worker’s Party “political officer” with no maritime function.

In Egypt North Korean diplomats have been expelled repeatedly for smuggling large quantaties of drugs over three decades. In 1976 diplomats were expelled for having 400 kilograms of hashish in their luggage, in 1998 diplomats were expelled with a half million tablets of Rohypnol—the so-called ‘date rape’ drug, and in2004, two diplomats in Egypt were expelled with 150,000 tablets of Clonazipam, an anti anxiety drug. These are just a random list of the broad range of official involvement in narcotics smuggling worldwide.

The contraband is often smuggled by land from North Korea through China and Russia or by ship to markets in Europe, Asia and the Middle East through private trading companies controlled by Bureau 39, diplomatic pouch, and hidden in cargo labeled legitimate material.

But North Korea’s state sponsored criminal syndicates have shifted priorities of the type of smuggled goods and the tactics used to transport and deliver them over the last 35 years, seeking to maximize profits and mask the source of origin as they have faced increasing international scrutiny. They have shifted from counterfeit dollars and opium and heroin in the 1970’s and 80’s to a sharp rise in methamphetamine in the 90’s to counterfeit cigarettes and pharmaceuticals and illegal weapons transfers in the last decade. They also have been involved in smuggling illicit elephant ivory, rhinocerous horns, conflict gemstones, fake postage stamps, untaxed liquor, CD’s, cigarettes, gold, vehicles, often through diplomatic pouched declared as innocuous goods. They have smuggled internationally controlled precursor chemicals for drug manufacture, and nuclear and weapons components, through front companies and organized crime groups. And they have increasingly shifted from direct retail delivery, through use of diplomats and state front companies, to wholesalers selling to organized crime syndicates who distribute the illicit goods worldwide. They have created a maze of changing front companies and bank accounts located worldwide, to stifle international scrutiny and disguise violations of national laws and international sanctions that can be directly linked to the North Korean regime. So as seizures of particular commodities ebb and flow, and distribution networks change, their commitment to controlling a worldwide criminal syndicate remains a central feature of state policy and aggregate revenues from illegal goods has remained consistent or increased. One marked shift is partnering with established criminal syndicates to transport and distribute illegal goods. “ DPRK linked illicit trading networks exist on every continent today – increasingly in partnership with organized crime groups,” said David Asher, a former senior U.S. government official in charge of counter North Korean criminal operations until 2005, citing a 2005 indictment of 87 people throughout the United States, “…an expansive network in the US linked to North Korea and Chinese criminal partners was documented. This network, as the unsealed indictments show, was engaged in selling tens of millions of dollars per year of contraband – everything from counterfeit US currency, counterfeit US postage stamps, counterfeit US branded cigarettes and state tax stamps, counterfeit Viagra, ecstasy, methamphetamine, heroin, AK-47s, and even attempting to sell shoulder fired missiles (manpads) and rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) into the US.”

William Newcomb, a former senior U.S. State Department official and North Korea specialist remarked in March 2011 that,” On the other hand, the continuing large-scale traffic in counterfeit cigarettes from DPRK territory suggests that enforcement against notorious organized criminality is lax. It is also possible that a lucrative counterfeit cigarette trade has replaced a riskier drug trafficking business as a generator of revenue for the DPRK state”

The lower profile, if indeed diminishing involvement, in narcotics trafficking by the North Koreans could be a reflection of the negative consequences of the very high profile criminal seizures, arrests, detentions, and expulsions incontrovertibly linking the regime to state sponsored illegal narcotics smuggling over 30 years since 1976. They have long had dealings with private organized crime from China, Russia, and Japan and appear to have expanded these networks worldwide—along with an estimated 120 shell front corporations—the PDRK increasingly acting as a wholesaler, using them as middlemen for distribution outside the country.

Shipping

Dozens of ships linked to North Korea have been seized with counterfeit US dollars and narcotics, as well as weapons, and cigarette paper, among other things. This exposed the highly unusual arrangement North Korea had entered into with the Cambodian Government to operate a “Flag of Convenience” office in Singapore, controlled and staffed by North Koreans, for a reportable bribe of millions of dollars and the promise that 30 North Korean ships could be registered under the Cambodian flag.

The company, the Cambodian Shipping Company, was established in 1994 by a long time North Korean diplomat who had served in Cambodia, and finally shut down under international pressure in 2002 after having numerous ships seized for illegal activity, including those originating from North Korea.

“Of most concern to the US and indeed to South Korea was the clear evidence that North Korean freighters flying the Cambodian flag or on the Cambodian register were moving ballistic missiles to clients in the Middle East and Africa,” , said Michael Richardson, author of the book “A Time Bomb for Global Trade: Maritime Related Terrorism in the Age of Weapons of Mass Destruction”.

In 2001 Irish customs found 20 million smuggled cigarettes on a Cambodian-registered ship that arrived from Estonia, its manifest claiming it had timber. The cigarettes concealed in the centre of bales of timber, were liable to tax amounting to about three million Irish pounds. It was the largest seizure of tobacco in Irish history. Irish officials said they were destined for a terrorist faction called the Real IRA, whose leader Shawn Garland was later indicted by the United States for laundering millions of dollars of counterfeit U.S. dollars he received at the North Korean embassies in Moscow and Minsk, Belarus and distributed throughout Europe. The 2001 cigarette bust was also said to originate in North Korea.

Spain seized a ship, tracked by U.S. intelligence departing from North Korea in November 2002 allegedly carrying cement to Yemen. In December 2002 it was seized in the Indian Ocean by Spanish and American military vessels. The So San was a Cambodian registered vessel said to be loaded with cement “but an examination revealed 15 Scud missiles with 15 conventional warheads, 23 tanks of nitric acid rocket propellant and 85 drums of unidentified chemicals all hidden beneath the bags of cement.” It was allowed to continue at the time. It’s cargo was later determined to have ended up in Libya. An embarrassed State Department spokesman responded: "At first we couldn't verify the nationality of the ship because the ship's name and the indications on the hull and the funnel were obscured. It was flying no flag."

Lloyd’s List, a shipping industry newspaper, said dozens of North Korean ships flew the Cambodian flag.

Also in 2002, the French seized the Cambodian registered ship the Winter after a firefight. They seized one ton of cocaine worth over 100 million dollars. The cargo was registered as scrap destined for Spain. Greek, French, and Spanish authorities had tracked the vessel.

David Cockroft, head of the International Transport Workers’ Federation said: "As long as governments and the UN turn a blind eye to the way FOCs allow criminals to operate anonymously, ships will be used to transport everything from drugs and illegal immigrants to the supplies used by the al-Qaida men who blew up the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania," Adding "The world should join us in demanding that Cambodia shut down this sleazy and pestilent offshore registration."

Lim In-Yong, a senior North Korean diplomat who had been stationed in Cambodia, owned the CSC , which was awarded the contract as the exclusive Cambodian government representative to register flags of convenience vessels in 1994. He was, on paper in partnership with the son in law of Cambodian King Norodom Sihanouk, Kek Vandy, married to the King’s eldest daughter. The CSC quickly gained a reputation as a rogue operation.

The Company, operating under the legal representative of the Cambodian government but operated by North Koreans, rapidly became notorious for illegal activities of the ships it registered. Aside from the above mentioned cases, they were implicated in smuggling oil out of Iraq during the embargo, smuggling cigarettes to Albania and Crete, human trafficking and prostitution to Japan and Crete, as well as other hauling contraband from weapons to drugs. Intelligence officials suspected North Korea was using CSC vessels to ship ballistic missile technology to Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan. Under Flags of Convenience vessels, it is difficult to identify who is the real owner of a ship.

By 2002 the company had registered ships of which 25 had shipwrecked, 41 crashed, nine fires and 45 arrests. Nine CRC registered ships were banned from entering European ports as unfit to sail.

A Cambodian government official, Ahamed Yahya , responded to the public inquiries. “We don’t know or care who owns the ships or whether they’re doing ‘white’ or ‘black’ business … it is not our concern.”

Under growing international complaints, the Cambodian government withdrew its license to the North Korean controlled CSC. But there are 40 nations that offer flags of convenience services, making it easy to disguise the origin and cargo for the transport of illegal goods. And making sanctions against interdicting North Korean illicit cargo much harder. “Arms smuggling, the ability to conceal large sums of money, trafficking in goods and people, and other illegal activities can also thrive in the unregulated havens which the flag of convenience system provides,” said Nick Winchester, an analyst in the Seafarers' International Research Centre at Cardiff University in Wales.

Cigarettes

Since at least the mid-1990s, the DPRK has engaged in the manufacture of counterfeit cigarettes along with packaging and tobacco revenue stamps of various countries. Taiwan law enforcement seized 20 shipping containers of fake cigarette wrappers destined for North Korea. According to a report from a private investigation launched by a consortium of Tobacco companies targeted by North Korean counterfeiters, “the seized materials could have been used to package cigarettes with a retail value of $1 billion.”

It reportedly hosts similar foreign-operated counterfeit cigarette ventures. Tobacco industry investigations concluded in 2005 that North Korea operated 10-to-12 active plants and determined that the DPRK military and the “internal security service” operated at least one plant each.

Tobacco industry investigators estimated North Korea could gross between $520 million and $720 million annually.

Made in North Korea ” counterfeit cigarettes are marketed throughout Asia, especially Taiwan and Indonesia, and in the United States. More recently, North Korea began making counterfeit pharmaceuticals, in particular Viagra, for foreign distribution, mostly Japan and South Korea.

North Korean factories are reckoned to produce 41 billion fake cigarettes a year, for sale in China, Japan and the US,” according to testimony in front of the U.S. Congress.

December 19, 2011

North Korea: The World's Only Mafia Crime State

How North Korea Funds their Army, Nuclear Weapons Programme. and Small Group of Elite Cadre in Control

(Excerpts from an unpublished study of the criminal syndicates run by Kim Jong Il as central State policy)

(Copyright Nate Thayer (No republication in full or in part without express written permission of the author)

By Nate Thayer

North Korea is the only nation where it is central government policy to operate as a systematic criminal syndicate through a myriad of state controlled illicit activities. According to evidence compiled over a recent six month investigation, the North Korean government has, since at least 1974, run a worldwide network of diplomats, intelligence operatives, military, and other government officials, as well as state controlled front companies that use the rights and powers of a sovereign state to manage illegal operations worldwide.

North Korean government operatives have intentionally violated laws in at least 106 countries in over 500 incidents as it has repeatedly evaded and ignored a series of multi lateral agreements and increasingly stricter sanctions imposed by the United Nations, as well as the laws of sovereign nations around the world.

Together these criminal activities, strictly controlled and coordinated by the ruling Korean Workers Party of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK), have used thousands of North Koreans from school children to some of an estimated 200,000 political prisoners as forced labor in the opium poppy fields, to workers in the manufacturing plants processing heroin, methamphetamine, fake pharmaceuticals, counterfeit US currency, counterfeit foreign cigarettes, as well as a sophisticated secret weapons systems and nuclear weapons development program. To oversee the production, manufacture, transport, and export of these products, they have employed the full apparatus of state institutions. These have included the use of military vessels, intelligence officials, diplomats, their foreign embassies, and a complex web of more than a hundred state controlled front companies with networks around the world,

Increasingly, after years of international scrutiny of North Korean officials abroad and hundreds of seizures in dozens of countries, they are partnering with established international criminal syndicates in China, other Asian countries, Russia, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States to distribute these illicit commodities around the globe. Since at least 1976, dozens of government operatives on official missions out of North Korea, many travelling on formal diplomatic status, have been apprehended for possession and smuggling of counterfeit cigarettes, counterfeit pharmaceuticals, counterfeit U.S. dollars, narcotics including heroin, hashish, opium, methamphetamine, and cocaine, and large quantities of controlled pharmaceuticals. In addition North Korean diplomats have been arrested, detained, or expelled from numerous countries for other lucrative crimes such as smuggling of endangered species parts, African ivory, counterfeit CD’s, and large amounts of untaxed alcohol and cigarettes hidden in diplomatic pouches, among other illicit goods. The products and their proceeds from these global operations have often moved around the world using officials travelling with diplomatic passports, who, under the Geneva accords of 1961, enjoy immunity from search, arrest, or prosecution.

As well, North Korean officials, and government controlled front corporations who operate internationally, and international crime syndicates working with the DPRK government, have been implicated in many countries as they distribute the goods and try to launder the proceeds from their illicit syndicates through international banking systems. Dozens of diplomats have been detained and expelled, some quietly, from countries in Africa, Asia, Russia, China, Europe, and South America. The activities of these state sponsored criminal enterprises have been identified in at least 106 countries on all continents except Antarctica, from 1976 through 2011, according to data compiled.

Revenue from this network in turn funds the elite of the Korean Workers Party, a repressive regime at home that defies U.S. and UN sanctions as it pursues a hostile foreign policy producing and exporting nuclear and sophisticated military technology that destabilizes countries and regions worldwide.

North Korea has been formally rebuked repeatedly by unanimous votes of the United Nations Security Council, the United States, and other affected countries for covertly evading a number of international prohibitions imposed on the isolated and secretive nation for developing and exporting sophisticated ballistic missile systems and nuclear technology. Some of the recipient nations, which are also banned from receiving such military technology, include Burma, Libya, Iran, and Syria. As well, North Korea has been exposed for violating repeated U.N sanctions prohibiting them from importing products for use in their programs of developing long range ballistic missiles, and weapons of mass destruction including the purchase of components for building chemical, biological and nuclear weapons systems.

It is believed that a substantial amount of the proceeds from their state sponsored criminal syndicates, which are under the direct control of the ruling Korean Workers Party and do not get distributed through the formal government budget, are used to covertly fund their nuclear and military programs . Since the late 1980's, they denied pursueing or possessing such technology, but more recently flaunt these capabilities, threatening to use them against declared enemies such as South Korea and the United States.

The proceeds from these illicit activities are estimated to equal 35-40% of the total revenue earned by the DPRK. Some estimate the illicit revenue to exceed 1 billion dollars a year. A significant portion of the revenue is suspected to fund the regimes banned nuclear weapons production and a sophisticated ballistic weapons systems. It is suspected that the proceeds, which by now may exceed $5 billion in reserves, have been variously shifted between banks in China, Singapore, Macau, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Austria, among other international accounts.

The criminal enterprises and the North Korean government agencies and officials who carry them out are coordinated by a highly secret unit, Bureau 39, (sometimes translated as ‘Office’ or ‘Room’ 39) under the authority of the ruling Korean Workers Party that reports directly to Kim Jung Il. The Bureau was created in 1974 specifically to raise hard currency to fund covert activities and as a source to reward elite party loyalists for continuing allegiance. It has offices throughout North Korea and more than 120 international front companies. It has 17 offices outside the DPRK, including China, Moscow, Macau, and Hong Kong. It’s primary purpose is to coordinate production and distribution of a worldwide network of illegal products and collect the revenue for Kim Jung Il.

In recent years international organizations and sovereign states, particularly the United Nations and the U.S., have passed resolutions, laws, and executive orders to try to undermine the ability of North Korea to operate its global criminal enterprise, but to little avail.

It has been argued that aggressively confronting North Korea for it’s criminal conduct as a mafia-like state, while trying to balance the pursuit of the higher international priorities of eliminating their capabilities to become a nuclear weapons power and supplier of nuclear technology, as well as exporter of sophisticated long range missile systems to dubious regimes around the globe, has created a conundrum for international negotiators, who fear that focusing on North Korean criminal enterprises will undermine the greater priority of securing military stability in one of the worlds most volatile and certainly most isolated and impenetrable nations.

For nearly two decades a series of established negotiating bodies served as a diplomatic forum engaging North Korea with other affected and concerned nations to provide a diplomatic solution to the threat of nuclear and sophisticated weapons development and proliferation. Although they were repeatedly met with broken promises and slow progress over a myriad of contentious issues, they maintained a dialogue and resulted in channels of verification that many analysts saw as essential in thwarting North Korea’s desires for a nuclear weaponized military capability.

Those diplomatic efforts came to an abrupt halt in 2001, as the Bush adminstration chose a new course in confronting and pressuring the North Korean government.

In April 2005, North Korean Vice Minister Kim Kye-gwan warned, “[The United States] should consider the danger that we could transfer nuclear weapons to terrorists, that we have the ability to do so.” Formal diplomatic talks deteriorated since 2001, coming to a complete halt in 2009. Diplomatic negotiations have been dormant since, the parties engaged in increasingly hostile and aggressive actions towards each other.

By 2011, international law enforcement in scores of nations, key affected countries such as the United States, Japan and South Korea, and International bodies such as the United Nations have repeatedly imposed sanctions, held diplomatic negotiations, and passed laws and mandated resolutions attempting to halt North Korea’s role as a destabilizing force in the region and the world. The DPRK reaction has been to continue its illicit covert schemes and ratchet up an aggressive military posture. But the threat of a rogue state, now possessing nuclear weapons capability as well as an aggressive manufacturer and exporter of sophisticated ballistic missile technology, funded by a vast network of covert production and export of illegal goods, has only expanded.

Overview of Illegal Activities

Among the oldest, key criminal activities controlled by Bureau 39 is the production distribution and laundering of the world’s highest quality counterfeit United States currency. In addition the bureau has managed the production and distribution of opium, heroin, and methamphetamine, billions of counterfeit brand name cigarettes, counterfeit pharmaceuticals, long range ballistic missiles, and the transfer of nuclear technology and expertise to other regimes, and building a nuclear weapons arsenal. Other illicit activities include state sponsored insurance fraud, money laundering, gold smuggling, taxable items smuggled through diplomatic officials, and the trade in protected species such as elephant ivory and Rhinoceros tusks.

On more than 100 occasions, all of these materials have been seized in the possession of North Korean diplomats or shown to have occurred. They are facilitated by government officials, government controlled ships, planes, and international trading companies that are front organizations controlled by North Korean government clandestine offices. They have resulted in the seizure, detention, expulsion, or arrest of North Korean government officials, or their associates, often using diplomatic passports, or these activities have been verified as occurring in at least 106 countries from 1976 through 2011.

Revenues from illicit state sponsored organized crime are, by their very nature, speculative at best. Annual revenues from counterfeit US currency are estimated at between 15 and 100 million US dollars, illegal drug manufacture and sale of heroin, opium, and methamphetamine have carried estimates as high as between 100 million to one billion dollars, counterfeit cigarette manufacture and sale at between 560 and 720 million dollars, and weapons, military components, nuclear technology, and missile sales at as much as 560 million dollars.

In 1976, two years after the creation of Bureau 39, North Korean officials began being apprehended around the world for engaging in criminal activity. Sweden, Norway, and Denmark expelled 17 North Korean diplomats, including the entire Norwegian diplomatic staff and two ambassadors, for the sale of drugs, untaxed alcohol and cigarettes.

In North Korea, where virtually all economic activity is controlled by the state, Bureau 39 handles all hard currency transactions, including some legal projects such as export of mushrooms, ginseng and proceeds from the handful of hotels where foreign visitors must stay in Pyongyang.

Travelling mainly under diplomatic passports, their illicit cargo has been seized in dozens of countries at an escalating rate that peaked in the late 1990’s. Scores of North Korean government officials have been arrested, detained and expelled, illicit goods seized

in hundreds of incidents, occurring on every continent except Antartica for the last 35 years. Such criminal activity directly linked to the North Korean government has been documented in at least 57 countries since 1976.

Reports from numerous cases of North Korean state sponsored involvement in production, manufacture and distribution of illicit products began in the mid 1970’s and gained momentum into an overwhelming pattern of a DPRK controlled government criminal conspiracy by the late 1990’s. Arguably the most isolated, secretive, and impenetrable nation in the world, firm evidence has proven difficult to gather and more difficult to prove.

Operating outside the formal government structure, Bureau 39 is an office technically under the structure of the ruling Korean Workers Party Secretariat, which reports to the Central Committee of the Party. Its establishment to operate illicit activities included the purpose of funding the cash starved nation’s military and nuclear development programs.

“ North Korea’s Central Committee Bureau 39 is an active participant in the criminal economy of the region with tentacles extending well beyond Asia,” according to a study published in March 2010 by the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College. The PDRK operates what “is essentially criminal sovereignty whereby it organizes its illegitimate activities behind the shield of non-intervention while using the tools of the state to perpetrate these schemes abroad."

While outside the government structure Bureau 39 fully uses the state apparatus including the diplomatic services, intelligence agencies, military, shipping vessels and aircraft, and an estimated 120 foreign front companies, which themselves are constantly renamed or dissolved and their function replaced by another shell company. These companies are used to covertly launder the proceeds from illicit transactions through foreign bank accounts variously reported to be located in China, Macau, Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, and Singapore, according to several studies, including Congressional testimony in March 2011.

Its most powerful entity is the Deasung General Bureau, which controls scores of foreign trading front companies and banks, and reports to the ruling KWP Organization and Guidance Department. They, in turn, report to Bureau 39.

In November 2010 the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Deasung General Bureau stating it “was owned or controlled by Office 39 of the Korean Workers Party. Office 39 is a secretive Branch of the government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea that provides critical support to North Korean leadership through engaging in illicit economic activities and managing slush funds and generating revenue for the leadership.”

The U.S. Department of Treasury Department determined that the Korean Daesong General Trading Corporation was “ facilitating North Korean trafficking in arms and related materiel; procurement of luxury goods; and engagement in certain illicit economic activities, such as money laundering, the counterfeiting of goods and currency, bulk cash smuggling and narcotics trafficking."

A confidential November 2010 UN Security Council Panel of Experts report, ordered to study North Korean compliance with UN Security Council resolutions responding to North Korean long range ballistic missile and nuclear bomb testing, had banned, among other things, North Korea from the export or import of nuclear technology and any weapons systems. The secret report was leaked in December 2010.

The 47 page document said “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea maintains a wide network of trade offices that work in close conjunction with its diplomatic missions overseas. These offices are charged with both procurement and developing select trade opportunities of interest to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s leadership, including arranging and handling its illicit trade and covert acquisitions,” said the UN confidential report dated 10 November 2010. It continued: “While much of the country’s illicit or covert acquisition activities are handled by these offices, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has also established links with overseas criminal networks to carry out these activities, including the transportation and distribution of illicit and smuggled cargoes. This may also include weapons of mass destruction, sensitive goods and arms and related materiel smuggling.”

All figures and statistics on the DPRK are highly speculative and are often derived from teams of international and US law enforcement and intelligence analysts and technology. Some information comes from North Korean defectors. Other data has been compiled through the seizure of illicit goods in dozens of countries around the world. And still more evidence is provided by anecdotal press reports from various incidents involving law enforcement in nations spanning the globe. The United States and South Korea have taken the most active role in deciphering what transpires in what is arguably the most isolated, secretive, and impenetrable nation in the world. It is reported to use proceeds of the state sponsored criminal syndicate in its nuclear development program.

The North Korean government, through Bureau 39, are increasingly assisted and coordinate with established organized crime syndicates from China, Japan, and Russia, elsewhere in Asia, the United States, and Europe. They have cooperated with non-state terrorist organizations including the IRA, Hezbollah, and insurgencies in Sri Lanka and Nepal. And they have laundered proceeds from illicit activities through banking systems worldwide, including Macau, China, Switzerland, Austria, Hong Kong, Luxembourg and Singapore, according to US government, United Nations, other governments, and press reports.

In 2011, North Korea again faces severe food shortages. An estimated more than one million people died from famine in the 1990’s. United Nations humanitarian agencies report that millions are suffering from malnutrition in 2011. The government provides minimal services to the population, controls all sectors of the economy and is ranked 179th in the world—dead last—in the Index of Economic Freedom, and regularly ranked as having one of the world’s most egregious human rights records. It has refused to meet long standing international debt obligations, and together with sanctions imposed by the United Nations, finds it difficult to meet minimal standards to trade through normal international financial structures. While publicly appealing for international funds to stem another famine, with a population of only 23.9 million people, North Korea finances and maintains the 4th largest standing army in the world, with more than one million active duty soldiers and 4.6 million in reserve.

Throughout the 1990’s until the US began imposing increasingly harsh sanctions in 2005, Macau served as a hub of laundering criminal proceeds through a series of North Korean front companies and cooperative banks and lax financial security in the gambling Mecca.

Counterfeit U.S. Money

In 1994, officials from a North Korean front company, Zokwang trading company, a direct subsidiary of Bureau 39, travelling on diplomatic passports, attempted to deposit 250,000 dollars in fake US dollars in a Macau bank and were arrested and expelled. It was one of many incidents that led to a September 2005 US Treasury Department action naming and freezing the assets of North Korean front companies, Macau banks, and North Korean officials.

Kim Jung Il, in his capacity as head of Bureau 39, first ordered counterfeit 100 dollar bills be produced in the 1970’s through bleaching U.S. one dollar bills. The first counterfeit notes paid for covert terror campaigns against South Korea, such as the bomb explosion on a South Korean commercial plane killing all 155 civilian passengers in 1987 and the bombing of senior officials of South Korea, including President Chun Doo-Hwan in Burma in 1983 that killed four cabinet members and 13 other South Koreans .

The first detection of the North Korean “super note” was by a suspicious bank teller in the Philippines in 1989.

Since then hundreds of millions of dollars of the bills have appeared in dozens of countries around the world. Many North Korean officials have been seized in possession of the bills.

In South Korea counterfeit bills have increased there since North Korean fake U.S. dollars appeared in Hong Kong in early 2006. Days later China ordered banks to “increase vigilance” for fake U.S. bills.

By the late 1980’s, as the economic crisis in the communist states imploded with the collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea increased the production and sophistication of its counterfeit dollars.

Since the first counterfeit bills were manufactured, US government officials have documented 19 versions of the “super note”, all they allege are improvements that are produced in the PDRK. It was in the late 1970’s that North Korea purchased its intaglio printing presses from a Swiss company that sells strictly to governments.

They also bought special ink from the same Swiss company used by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing nearly exactly the same color used by the US . As well, paper with a nearly identical percentage of cotton fiber as that used on U.S. notes is used in North Korean supernotes.

In 2004, a North Korean defector, interviewed by the BBC in South Korea, said. “We bought the best of everything - the best equipment and the best ink. But we also had the very best people, people who had real expertise and knowledge in the field. ….When government officials or diplomats travelled to south-east Asia they distributed the counterfeit notes mixed in with the real one’s, at a ratio of about 50-50.”

In October that year the FBI seizure of 300,000 dollars in super notes hidden among cargo on a ship originating in China arrived at the Newark, New Jersey port, marked the first evidence of US fake dollars from North Korea smuggled into the United States.

In 2005, the US launched a series of countermeasures against North Korea targeting the counterfeit program, money laundering related to drug trafficking and other illicit activities, including criminal indictments in the U.S. and sanctions against North Korean front companies and foreign banks operating in other countries.

It signified a change in US policy to avoid public condemnation of North Korea’s government operated criminal syndicates for fear it would thwart the larger national interests of negotiating with the DPRK to halt it’s production, distribution, and export of nuclear technology and sophisticated weaponry that was the ongoing focus priority of US foreign policy for more than a decade.

In September of 2005, the US imposed sanctions against North Korean front companies, individuals, and a bank in Macau for laundering counterfeit dollars and other proceeds from North Korean criminal enterprises.

A March 2006 study by the independent Congressional Research Service made a connection between revenues from counterfeit money and other illicit proceeds and the fueling of nuclear proliferation. “The earnings from counterfeiting also could be significant to Pyongyang, and may be used to purchase weapons technology….or even underwrite the DPRK’s nuclear program.”

The next month, April 2006, the U.S State Department made public accusations against the DPRK regime that their illicit trade was operating increasingly with networks of international organized crime. North Korean’s “have been apprehended trafficking in narcotics and engaged in other forms of criminal behavior,” concluded the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report released in March 2006, “including passing counterfeit U.S. currency.”

That same month a Congressional Research Services report on North Korean Counterfeiting stated: ”These have been carried out in league with criminal organizations around the world."

It added that revenue from criminal syndicates were essential to keeping the regime in power.

The United Nations and both the Bush and Obama administrations have shifted to a more confrontational policy regarding the PDRK, from negotiations on stopping the North Korean program for nuclear and missile development programs, to increased confrontation over their state sponsored criminal activity and financial sanctions directed to punish the North Koreans for weapons development .

Since President Clinton left office in January 2001 until the present, there has been a marked escalation of hostility between the two sides that has reached a complete breakdown in diplomatic negotiations over the development of the PDRK nuclear and other military program. The U.S. and the United Nations have since created laws, resolutions, and Presidential Executive Orders to mitigate the effectiveness of some of the North Korean international criminal network and its military programs of acquiring nuclear weapons and exporting sophisticated weapons......TO BE CONTINUED

December 12, 2011

Thayer’s reporting has earned him The World Press Award, the 1997 British Press Awards 2006 Scoop_of_the_YearBritish Press Award, and the 1998 Francis Frost Wood Award for Courage in Journalism, given by to a journalist "judged to best exemplify physical or moral courage in the practice of his or her craft."

He was the recipient of the Center for Public IntegrityInternational Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting oof the Year (http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/icij http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/icij/journalists/profile/856/ "Upon awarding Thayer the ICIJ Award, the judges noted: :"He illuminated a page of history that would have been lost to the world had he not spent years in the Cambodian jungle, in a truly extraordinary quest for first-hand knowledge of the Khmer Rouge and their murderous leader. His investigations of the Cambodian political world required not only great risk and physical hardship but also mastery of an ever-changing cast of Political faction characters." http://www.publicintegrity.org/assets/pdf/pi_1999_03.pdf Maud S. Beelman, "Reporting Across Borders," The Public i: Newsletter of the Center for Public Integrity,Vol 7, no. 2, Mar 1999.]

According to Vaudine England of the BBC "Many of the regions greatest names in reporting made their mark in the pages of the Far Eastern Economic Review from the legendary Richard Hughes of Korean War fame, to Nate Thayer, the journalist who found Cambodias Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot."http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8268105.stm Vaudine England, "Leading Asian Magazine to Close," BBC Asia-Pacific News, September 22, 2009.]

Thayer was also the first person in 57 years to turn down a prestigious Peabody Award because he did not want to share it with ABC News[Nightline] saying publicly lambasting American television news saying:"I in no way want my name associated with such egregious violations of journalistic and professional ethics." .http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/your-scoop-nah-its-ours-if-we-want-it-1157187.html "Your scoop? Nah. Its ours if we want it." The Independent May 25 1998.]

Thayer is also the recipient of The Overseas Press Club of America Award, as well as the Asian Society of Publishers and Editors Award for "Excellence in Reporting,"

Thayer was also honored with the SAIS-Novartis "Award for Excellence in International Reporting."

He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize by The Wall Street Jounral

In 1999 Thayer established at the Hofstra Universitys Department of Journalism and Mass Media Studies in the School of Communication theNate Thayer Scholarship given annually to "a qualified student with the best foreign story idea. Winners are selected on the basis of scholastic achievement or potential as well as economic need." http://www.hofstra.edu/pdf/1999/ho019900008.pdf Hofstra University Student Information Package, Financial Aid Section, p. 45.] http://www.hofstra.edu/Academics/Colleges/SOC/JMSPR/index.html

December 10, 2011

"Think that j-school degree and a desk in a newsroom is all you need to call yourself a journalist? Think again. Journalists are made on deadlines. Here’s my checklist to see if you are truly a journalist.

Written a 15-inch story in 30 minutes

Replaced one of the major food groups with coffee

Eat in your car more often than you do at a table

Gotten fired/laid off for no good reason

Forgotten what it’s like to have the weekend off

Can no longer read a newspaper without scanning for typos and errors

Learned that being told to “fuck off “ and “go to hell” is part of the job

December 08, 2011

Khmer Rouge, Cambodian Government Suffer Memory Failure in Court: This Might Help

By Nate Thayer

The witness at the moment on the stand testifying against Ieng Sary in today’s Khmer Rouge trial in Phnom Penh seems to be suffering a memory lapse. Let’s try to help him, and a few others who have remarkably similar maladies. The three leaders of the Khmer Rouge in the docket: Khieu Samphan, Nuon Chea, and Ieng Sary. The chief witness on the stand is Long Narin, for the last 30 years, Ieng Sary’s chief spokesman and closest loyalist.

He seems to be having memory problems. Let me see if this jogs his memory:

On August 6 1996, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge clandestine radio burst on the air and called for “the arrest and destruction of Ieng Sary and his miscreant clique,” said the radio announcer,”Ieng Sary has hidden himself among the resistance fighters for years,” stole party money, and was nothing less than an “agent of Vietnam. He is therefore sentenced to death.” The Khmer Rouge radio announcer whose voice it was? Khieu Samphan.

That would be Ieng Sary, Pol Pot’s brother-in-law. For relevant historical context, the two had been sentenced to death together already-together-as the “Pol Pot--Ieng Sary clique” in 1979 by the Vietnamese installed Hun Sen Government compromised of ex-Khmer Rouge..

On August 7, 1996, Ieng Sary replied on his newly acquired—now rebel—radio station. The Ieng Sary radio crackled from the jungle denouncing Pol Pot as “the cruelest and most savage of murderers” naming Nuon Chea as Pol Pot’s chief “henchman.” “The war criminals are nobody else but Pol Pot and his handful of henchmen: Nuon Chea…who are the mass murderers of the people of Cambodia, committing until now enormous crimes against mankind. As such, they are sentenced to death.”

Ieng Sary’s radio concluded that “This impetuous mass movement, this groundswell swept up all at once the bloodthirsty, dictatorial clique of Pol Pot and Nuon Chea…” The radio voice, reading from a statement signed in Ieng Sary’s name, ended with “I have decided to resume leadership.” The man whose voice it was? Long Narin. --The man testifying this morning in the docket unable to recall the “details” of his relationship with defendant Ieng Sary.

And for good measure, 3 days later Pol Pot’s radio announced: “The Cambodian people are not confused. They can tell gold from shit…So one-eyed Hun Sen, out-and-out lackey of communist Vietnam, stop barking like a mad dog to deceive others. You yourself have already been sentenced to death.” The announcement was made in the name of Khieu Samphan.

That same day, Ieng Sary’s radio went on the air with the voice of Long Narin and cleared things up a bit: “Constant mutual suspicion reigns,” Long Narin, chief spokesman for Ieng Sary declared.

That radio station was a gift of Hun Sen. Who promptly welcomed Ieng Sary back into the national fold and government. On 14 August, 1996, Hun Sen publicly declared over His radio, “I would like to guarantee the life, the security of Ieng Sary,” the same man he had sentenced to death a few years earlier. But now, Hun Sen had a change of heart and appointed Ieng Sary the new Governor of the Province of Pailin. He also loudly called for, and received, a royal pardon from all previous crimes issued by King Sihanouk. And he recognized Ieng Sary’s newly named political party The Democratic National Union Movement.

However Hun Sen’s then co Prime Minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh, objected: “Pol Pot, Ieng Sary…at least five or six of them are completely unacceptable.” Hun Sen dismissed that remark less than a year later when he launched a bloody coup, murdering and torturing scores of Ranarridh’s supporters and driving him from power. A number had their tongues ripped out while alive, under interrogation, or their eyes gouged out, or their penises chopped off and stuffed in their mouths, before being executed by leaders of the current government holding a trial against ex colleagues accused of committing “crimes against humanity” and “torture” in Phnom Penh.

On September 8, 1996, DNUM issued a typewritten document in English and Khmer and signed on official DNUM stationary and signed “Long Narin, Spokesman”. The document said “following the decision not to participate in the UNTAC organized elections, the dictatorial Khmer Rouge leadership was obliged to move its headquarters…At that time, though the old fox Pol Pot decided not to publicize his Machiavellian decision about His Excellency Ieng Sary for fear of the People’s and the Army’s opposition. His Excellency Ieng Sary had no more position in the leadership.” (signed) “DNUM Chief Spokesman, Long Narin”

The Ieng Sary radio was more specific on the reason for his break with Pol Pot and Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan. “I wanted to stay in Democratic Kampuchea, because I wanted to preserve our unity and thought it was still possible for me to express my opinion to a certain extent,” but “the dictatorial and murderous gang of Pol Pot (i.e. Sary’s current partners in the defence docket in the UN court, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan) began to openly make false accusations against me by labeling me as an agent of communist Vietnam and the Alliance (the grouping of the U.S., European and Asian countries now allied with the Phnom Penh government), as a traitor to the nation, the people and the Party” This “led me to make the decision to split forever with the dictatorial gang of Pol Pot, Nuon Chea…and found DNUM on August 15 1996…this movement stems from the profound aspirations of the cadre, combatants, and people of the liberated zone who rose in a tumultuous movement to eliminate the dictatorial and murderous gang of Pol Pot…it is a historical current no one can stop.”

So Ieng Sary left the “murderous gang” of Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, and Khieu Samphan, according to his own statement read by his chief spokesman Long Narin, not because of 1.7 million people who died while all three—now in court as co defendants-- were in command together. But because he was accused of being a “Vietnamese agent” and “traitor to the Party.”

This was according to Long Narin, who this morning, in court, can’t recall the details of his relationship with Ieng Sary. The same Long Narin who helpfully hand delivered English translated copies, with his signature, to reporters at the time. The spokeseman for Ieng Sary who was later pardoned, appointed by Hun Sen to the current government, and then arrested by the same Hun Sen, still current Prime Minister of Cambodia. (who, just to complete the circle, was an officer in the Khmer Rouge army commanded by the now defendants during the same period when hundreds of thousands were killed).

All four had previously, at various times, sentenced each other to death. Then later welcomed in high ceremony into the current government. Only to be pressured to have some arrested by the international community. And of which all of the above figures contend they have had a lapse of memory of above mentioned details. Perhaps this might help jog their convenient, individually selective memories a bit.

Dear Nate: Good to see your article, and I couldn't agree more with you on the lunacy of armed conflict as you perfectly describe it. However, your conclusion regarding landmines is questionable. Your argument seems to be since conflict is unlikely to cease soon (agreed) then any international convention to take away a tool of the mass insanity will fail (facts are against you on the later). We watch this carefully, and track it in our annual Landmine Monitor reports (www.the-monitor.org). While there are some ups and downs in the pattern, we are clearly making a difference. Since the 1997 Treaty came into existence, casualties from antipersonnel mines have dropped almost 75%. 80% of the world's governments have joined the treaty, which requires them to destroy their stockpiles and production capacity- they can't give it away or sell it. Known legal trade in the weapon has halted for more than a decade. Ground has been cleared of the weapon, last year areas of land 9 times the size of metro Paris were cleared of mines and returned to productive human use. Non-state armed groups have also stopped using the weapons. A couple of reasons for this, one is the global norm we have created which stigmatizes users of the weapon, and many non-state armed groups are struggling for legitimacy and therefore do not use the weapon. Also they have relied in the past on state stocks which they could buy, steal or lift from the field, as those stocks are destroyed, and land is cleared under the convention, they have lost those sources. The main countries in which non-state armed groups still use landmines- Afghanistan, Burma and Colombia, they make their own. However, since 2000, use of mines, self-made or otherwise, by non-state armed groups has dropped from 18 to 4 in 2011. While we have yet to totally eradicate the weapon, we are on track. And this has saved an enormous number of lives, both of combatants and non-combatants. You are right, basically we need to bring a halt to this mass insanity in which young males are enticed to kill the latest enemy for the latest reason. However, taking away a few of the means in the meantime can't hurt. Cordially, Yeshua

Yeshua: Thanks for the reasoned well sourced reply. Of course we are in agreement on the basic issues. I do take issue with some of your definitions and statistical methodology at first read. But I will make sure I examine what you are basing your conclusions on before responding.

My basic point is that while formal landmines can be restricted, they will be replaced by more crude explosive devices to serve the same tactical purpose. And they will be much harder to track control remove regulate or enforce. For instance what do you categorize IED'd as. Surely they are landmines. And surely they are in wider use now than 1997 What do govt and guerrilla forces use to secure their perimeter with in Afghanistan for instance. Particularly in contested remote areas? Or in African conflicts? I will respond thoughtfully after reading your msg carefully.

Of course we are on the same team here. Anything that will eliminate or reduce civilian and combatant casualties is good. And to make them effectively more enforceable by international treaty. So, as I said in my post, my comments were as much interrogative as a statement. I remain open minded and will reply. I would like to post your comment as a reply on my blog if I have your permission

warm regards on good work,Nate

Nate, Sure, you are welcome to post my reply on your blog. There has been a dramatic increase in IEDs in insurgencies around the world, especially since Iraqi insurgents brought the superpower to its knees through their use. Wow, what self-respecting rebel is going to pass up this easy to make weapon? However, IEDs do not resemble, nor are they used in the same way, as the landmines proscribed by the 1997 Convention. This difference is further obfuscated by many journalists reporting anything on the ground which goes boom as a 'landmine' (especially in S Asia... I'll be giving a workshop on Reporting on Explosive Weapons at the Indian Press Club in January as part of our efforts to get accurate reporting). The convention was mobilised by humanitarian groups, a history you know well. The focus was on the indiscriminate nature of the weapon. Once laid, it kills friend or foe, much like the AV mine you got up close and personal with. The Mine Ban Treaty bans any weapon, not just antipersonnel mines, which explodes due to the presence, proximity or activity of a human being. This means they are activated by the victim. Most IEDs are targeted weapon, they are not victim activated. They require the operator to trigger them, usually through remote, electric, command (frequently cellphones, but also by wire). These targeted bombs have been used in Iraq, Chechniya, Afghanistan, S. Thailand and India by rebels to devastating effect. Of course, just like US drones, they sometimes get it wrong and wipe out a bus load of ordinary folk. When that happens, by either NATO or the Maoists, it is a war crime, but does not come under the Mine Ban Treaty. So, no, IEDs are not covered by the Mine Ban Treaty. With the exception of those which meet the treaties definition, however most don't. Do we need another convention to cover them? Well that's not going to happen. Anyway I'd prefer a convention against all war, or if we keep them only sending presidents and generals to fight them..... by the way, all explosive boobytraps are prohibited by the mine ban treaty. Cordially, Yeshua

Yeshua:

I take no issue with any of the below. And again we are on the same team onn these issues. I am aware of how you described the tactical use of IED's. And I am not trying to much up the debate with Socratic logic to detract from the legitimacy of your premise or the practical compromises that have to be made.

My original point was the use of a tactic weapon to secure the perimeter of infantry grunts actually at risk and deployed to carry out the combat. If landmines are banned, what will/do they now use in there place to secure their perimeter? I know it is different for newer usage of asymmetrical warfare, "terrorism" which targets civilians, and urban warfare in general (all of which violate existing international rules, laws, conventions, and treties of war), but in the field, say Afghanistan, what do forward deployed soldiers use to secure their AO? If they aren't using landmines, they are replacing them with something. And victim-activated devices may be banned, but thats the only way you are going to secure whatever piece of real estate you are using as a forward operating base. So, are they using imporvised explosives designed for other purposes or homemade or landmines? If not then waht? They certainly aren't going to rely on a gentleman's agreement with the other side when office hours are open for business. That is pretty much the basis of my entire admittedly intentionally provocative post. if you can convince me of another way that two sides on a mission to murder the other can replace that or not need to employ it, then I will promptly retract my (very luke warm and probably not really honestly committed to but meant to initiate a debate) initial opposition to the Treaty

Thanks for the substantive and thoughtful rersponses,Nate

Below is the Original post or you can see full version on this blog:

Why Landmines Should not be Banned

By Nate Thayer

Great piece by Luke Hunt, as is his norm. But with the full knowledge I will get rebuked like a convicted pedophile arguing for the right to work as a summer camp counselor for teenagers, I am opposed to a ban on landmines and the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Treaty. I promise I love my mother, dogs, children, and freedom etc. etc. But, in my view, an international treaty making it illegal to manufacture, produce sell, export, buy, and use anti-personnel mines will result in increasing civilian and non-combatant casualties, and increase both the number of combatants wounded and the severity of their wounds. Here is my reasoning:

The statistics swing wildly, as does the category what team is allowed to murder whom and when, which team doesn’t have the thumbs up to kill, or whom it is against the rules to murder (see below for far more random data than you want to know), but it is generally accepted that well over 250 million people were killed by political groups in the 20th century—far more than any century in human history. It was a century that began with a murder that sparked a war in Sarajevo, interrupted by an icon event of world harmony and unity—the Olympics—in Sarajevo and ended with a mass orgy of mass killing and atrocities in Sarajevo. And it only seems to be getting worse since. There have been several hundred wars this last century, but the figure swings wildly depending on who is counting what and where.

But my conclusion is that it looks like it is going to be a while before people figure out another way to settle their differences. Another way than sending off as-close-to-teenage-boys-that-might-still-think-it-is-a-like-a-video-game as they can get away with, to do their killing or get killed trying to not let the other team kill the guy who sends the other guy who thinks it is like a video game off to prevent him from getting killed while trying to kill the opposing teams elite.

But, at the end of the day, anybody who has been to war knows that the first thing you do when you seize a piece of real estate is to protect your perimeter from being penetrated by someone trying to kill you. It is human nature. So you can take care of such matters as eating, talking, sleeping, thinking, and, in general trying not to dwell on the fact that you are unwanted where you are enough that someone will kill you for being there. It has nothing to do with politics. Or country. Or freedom. Or justice. Or ideology. Or patriotism etc. It has to do with not getting killed.

To secure your perimeter you must make the other team afraid enough to not risk trying to breach it. So you put things that explode and will kill them under the ground or along a path or between trees to make a circle around you that will kill them so they won’t kill you. So you can eat, sleep, and wake up. It has nothing to do with landmines per se. They make them designed to just blow your leg off and NOT kill you so two other guys will be out of action also because they need to carry you back from whence you came. Actually the good ones are designed to blow three peoples legs off to make SIX other guys, totaling nine, to be out of action. They have landmines that can bounce in the air and instead of blowing your leg off, blow up chest high to kill a bunch of the other team. Or attached in a line down a path so the first guy sets off an explosion that kills a whole line of guys going back, say, 40 feet. There are all kinds of tricks. You can easily make your own landmine from any explosive—a mortar, or artillery shell, grenade or a Budweiser beer can filled with innards of bullets etc. The point being that banning landmines isn’t going to stop some young fellow from doing whatever he can to make sure he can eat and sleep to minimize the chances of someone from the other team trying to kill him successfully while he does so.

It is human nature to try and avoid death, pain, injury or danger.

I will add here I speak as someone who has been on the wrong side of a landmine. Actually two landmines placed on top of one another just for good measure. Two anti-tank mines. I was in a Russian truck that the team I was with had just captured from the other team. After taking their whole town. We were driving at night down a jungle dirt path back towards our team’s locker room. Before this particular battle, the team I was with didn’t have any tanks—or trucks. These anti-tank mines are pressure designed. You can walk on them and they won’t go off, but you drive over it and the weight of the vehicle will create an explosion that will shake the earth ten miles away. I was 4 feet away when we did just that. It was placed earlier by my own team I was with to prevent the other team from driving their tanks—or trucks—through my team’s perimeter. But I guess they forgot. There were three of us in the front of the truck and six in the bed of the Russian Zil transport military vehicle. I was in the middle in the front. The mine blew the truck into the air like a child’s toy and shredded it into a thousand shards of lethal metal. The other two people sitting with me were killed. Well not immediately. I woke up in the engine compartment of the now non-existent truck with a severed leg across my face. It wasn’t mine. I checked. It was however the driver whom I had been sitting next to. He was holding the stump of his leg with the expression of frozen eyed indescribable shock of someone who knows he is about to die. He cried calling for his mother for what seemed like a long time. Then he died. The fellow sitting on my other side was luckier. He took shrapnel through his brain and died instantly. It was rainy. It was night. It was a jungle. And we were seven miles from the nearest place where someone wouldn’t shoot us if we arrived. Several were badly injured. I had shrapnel through my legs torso and head. And several broken bones. We tied a hammock to a small tree we cut down and carried the more seriously wounded through the jungle towards “home”. I only realized my ankle bone was sticking out of my leg when I stepped in a muddy puddle and pain shot up to my brain. I only realized I had pieces of metal in my head when I tasted blood dripping in my mouth, wiped my face, and my hand was covered in bright crimson liquid. Two died while we walked—for two and a half hours.

My point being only I really don’t like landmines at all. So it might seem odd I support them being used as a weapon of war, but it isn’t idle ignorance of the suffering they inflict. But it makes a lot of sense actually. Because I didn’t and don’t want to die.

If you make landmines illegal, it will be like alcohol prohibition or making marijuana illegal. It won’t stop them from being used; it will just make the issue worse. Think IED and Iraq and Afghanistan. Those aren’t landmines. But they are. They are just homemade. And far messier and harmful.

If landmines are controlled and regulated, it is a far more sensible and workable option. They can be designed to easily be detected and removed. Rules of war can be made to require they be mapped when placed, removed when the other team seizes that particular plot of land, or made to disintegrate after a period of time--whenever whatever organized lethal squabbling brought these young boys to wherever they are that requires more than turning off the bedside lamp to get a good night sleep.

But you can’t make laws that prevent people from trying simply to not let someone else they really have no beef with personally be able to kill them when they are eating lunch or sleeping. If you want to stop that from happening, then perhaps it is better to focus on not ordering sending these people off to kill and get killed because you want to protect your money, political power, or religion, or race, or whatever belief system is deemed worthy enough to declare war on the other team.

According to the Red Cross, the civilian to soldier death ratio in wars fought since the mid-20th century has been 10:1 and rising. From 1900 to 1987 more than 170 million were killed as defined by “death by government.” From 1945 and up to 1987, about 76,000,000 people have been murdered in cold blood by one regime or another. Most of this for political reasons of state or power, but also outright genocide—murder for reasons of ethnicity, race, religion, or nationality. From 1900 to 1987, about 39,000,000 people were killed in genocide or 20 million by the definition of genocide since WW2. And estimated 19 more million were killed between 1990 and 2000. So 80 million in war murdered since WWII. Only twelve countries in the world have a population larger than this. Then you add on that the additional that have been killed by government violence in the 20th century—not war among combatants--but mass murder or intentional killings of their own people under their political control. Estimates are more than 150 million. The statistics people have actually devoted their lives to figure out categorizing the above to justify, excuse, create rules to make it morally OK, or to blame it on the other team are staggering. There is a list “ Attributing casualties caused just to Christians” and lists of “How many people have died in the name of Christ, Christianity and Catholicism?” and lists of “Victims of the Christian Faith” which include “Ancient Pagans, Mission, Crusades (1095-1291), Heretics, Witches, Religious Wars, Jews, Native Peoples, 20th Century Church Atrocities”, Then there is a list of “Death by Government” and an actual US military computerized system to estimate acceptable levels of “Collateral Damage” i.e. percentage of civilians acceptable to kill in a military operation. The software used is known as “FAST-CD” or “Fast Assessment Strike Tool—Collateral Damage." A helpful, if a bit transparently sure- of-himself author explains how it works which I am not sure really makes much difference if you’re the one who is dead. “When followed, this process dramatically reduces the amount of collateral damage in U.S. military operations, and also ensures high levels of political accountability.” Here he gives the people who might be killing you a bit of wiggle room. “However, due to the realities of combat operations, the process is not always followed. The U.S. military’s collateral damage estimation process is intended to ensure that there will be a less than 10 percent probability of serious or lethal wounds to non-combatants. Less than 1% of pre-planned operations which followed the collateral damage estimation process resulted in collateral damage.” What a relief to know that, I am sure any reader would agree. The author continues to reassure potentially dead people: “When collateral damage has occurred, 70% of the time it was due to failed “positive identification” of a target, 22% of the time it was attributable to weapons malfunction, and a mere 8% of the time it was attributable to proportionality balancing - e.g. a conscious decision that anticipated military advantage outweighed collateral damage. “ Ah hah! So only 8% of the times were the murders of women, children, old people or other people not dressed hostilely intentionally killed? What a reassurance that is. He continues, a bit annoyingly, self-riotously: “According to public statements made by U.S. government officials the President of the United States or the Secretary of Defense must approve any pre-planned ISAF strike where 1 civilian casualty or greater is expected.”

Then the lists get endlessly more entertaining on who it is OK to kill, who, and why is doing the killing, and who killed against the rules (the rules of OK being quite remarkably distinct from each other) There is the “Overview of Twentieth Century Wars, Massacres and Atrocities: Source List and Detailed Death Tolls for Man-made Multicides throughout History” It only gets more unpleasant. There are lists that just include soldiers—dismissing the women children and civilians as not statistically relevant to study for that project. “There are endless lists of “Wars of the Twentieth Century” and “Death Tolls for the Multicides of the Twentieth Century”,(see below starting with “Alphabetical Index (A-J)” Almost every war falls into one of two categories: Ethnic conflict or religious conflict. There are lists of subcategories or additional lists where religion is just one of several issues worth murdering or being killed for. And then a list where different ethnic groups fought for primarily religious reasons. There is a list which is prefaced: “This list focuses on atrocities which are largely the direct result of unbridled corporate exploitation. Obviously, many additional conflicts have an underlying economic cause which operates indirectly.”

Then you have what defines a civilian casualty of war. The label ‘civilian’ is parsed and selectively applied in a multitude of definitions to make killing them acceptable for one team or another. You would think a civilian is pretty simple-- any person who does not belong to the armed forces of one side trying to kill the other team. But there are endless debates about, for example, civilian contractors, working with the military, or “terrorists” (which is another category with an endless disputed list of one group of people given the A-OK too kill another group). Not to mention whether said defined terrorist group has the green light to kill category “B” of said defined target for murder. So that complicates the whole issue of how one defines a “civilian casualty of war.” The disputed groups of who without a uniform and gun shooting back at you deserves to die a legal murder include: Those killed as a direct effect of war; Those injured as a direct effect of war; Those dying, whether during or after a war, from indirect effects of war such as disease, malnutrition and lawlessness, and who would not have been expected to die from such causes in the absence of the war; Victims of one-sided violence, such as when states slaughter their own citizens in connection with a war; Victims of rape and other sexual violence in connection with a war; Those forced to flee their homes from war – that is, refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs); and those who, even after a war is over, die prematurely from injuries sustained in war.

Virtually every atrocity statistic is denied, minimized or rejected by someone, but the following lists of dead people from being murdered for a political reason are among the most argued about: Racism, since, as a collection of physical traits is not really a scientific concept, how do you attribute motive to murder from purely racial conflicts and all other ethnic conflicts? Whether a conflict is racist depends on whether the bad guy comes from the other side of the river or the other side of the planet. Generally, racism is covered by the African Diaspora, Apartheid, Colonial Activities and Indians.

Then there is the list of “Secondary Wars and Atrocities of the Twentieth Century” and “Deaths by Mass Unpleasantness: Estimated Totals for the Entire 20th Century” Which I find particularly clever.

Then there is the Infamous Proverbial Body Count Quiz Show Debate: How many people died in all the wars, massacres, slaughters and oppressions of the Twentieth Century? Here are a couple figures to choose from. Note the categories the different researchers deem OK to call “Against The Rules.”

Cherif Bassouni, "Searching for peace and achieving justice: the need for accountability", published on Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 59: no. 4.) 33 million "military casualties" (that would mean dead boys carrying a gun wearing the same color coordinated clothes only); 170 million which is defined as dead people killed by or fighting their own governments in "conflicts of a non-international character, internal conflicts and tyrannical regime victimization" and “includes 86 million since the Second World War” for a grand total of 203 million people.

Or you can choose Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-first Century (1993)” He counts "Lives deliberately extinguished by politically motivated carnage": which he says is 167 million to 175 million which includes “War Dead: 87,500,000”, “Military war dead: 33,500,000”, “Civilian war dead: 54,000,000”, “Not-war Dead: 80,000,000”, “Communist oppression: 60,000,000” Or then for selective reading there is David Barrett, “World Christian Encyclopedia (2001)”, who just counts “Christian martyrs only” at 45.5M. Or Stephane Courtois, in “The Black Book of Communism”, who limits dead victim to “Victims of Communism only” at 85-100 million. Or there is Milton Leitenberg who slices up the body count to only include “Politically caused deaths in the 20th century” which he puts at 214 million to 226 million” which sub diced up into “Deaths in wars and conflicts, including civilian: 130 million to 142 million” and ‘Political deaths, 1945-2000” which, probably through some government funded research grant comes up with the pretty darn laser clear number of “50 million to 51 million. Then there is the oddly titled list “Not The Enemy Media” which lists those “Killed through U.S. foreign policy since WWII, as of July 2003” to the pretty darn mathematically specific “10,778,727 to 16,861,695 (1945-May 2003).” Or there is the abruptly titled ominous list by Rudolph J. Rummel, titled “ Death By Government”, which comes up with (Google the word, I had to) "Democides - Government inflicted deaths (1900-87)” and has a grand total of exactly “169,198,000” which includes the suspiciously partisan sounding categories of “Communist Oppression” which he places at “110,286,000” and the very different murderer but same dead result of “Democratic democides” which are suspiciously lopsidedly slim at “2,028,000.” He also, for fun or because his government research grant budget hadn’t been all spent yet maybe, has a list clarifying “Not included among democides”( but just as dead: my inserted notation): “Wars: 34,021,000” and “Non-Democidal Famine (which he helpfully defines for us: my notation) “(often including famines associated with war and communist mismanagement):” and then provides further scientific sub categories of “China (1900-87): 49,275,000” and “Russia: (1921-47): 5,833,000” for a total of “258,327,000 for all the categories listed here.” Phew!!

Or the more sober data chart of Matthew White, “Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century, 2010)” which has the list as follows: “Deaths by War and Oppression during the 20th Century: 203 million”

Military

Collateral*

Democide

Famine

Total

Wartime

37m

27m

41m

18m

123m

Peacetime

0

0

40m

40m

80m

TOTAL

37m

27m

81m

58m

203m

Mr. White, thankfully defines “Collateral = civilian deaths that are generally considered to be an unavoidable, legitimate byproduct of waging war.” And breaks it down further as “My estimate for the Communist share of the century's unpleasantness: Genocide & Tyranny: 29 million” and just to be clear adds it is “including intentional famine.” There is a separate list of dead people from other people being upset with some group of another people Mr. White includes of “Man-made Famine: 41 million” adding “(excluding intentional famine, but including both wartime and peacetime)” which , frankly still leaves me a bit confused. He has other lists for the cause of a specific group of dead people which are “Communist-inspired War (for example the Russian Civil War, Vietnam, Korea, etc.)” which he calculates at “Military: 7 million” and “Civilian (collateral): 10 million” And just so he is perfectly clear as to who caused who to be dead from what and for what reason, he adds “NOTE: With these numbers, I'm tallying every combat death and accidental civilian death in the war, without differentiating who died, who did it or who started it. According to whichever theory of Just War you are working from, the Communists may be entirely blameless, or entirely to blame, for these 17 million dead.” His final tally for dead people by political allegiance (or more accurately lack of allegiance, but still dead for some degree of political something or other he continues: “TOTAL: 87 million deaths by Communism.” And “RESIDUE: 116M deaths by non-Communism.”

He has further lists, he says “For Comparison” of dead people including “smallpox, smoking, abortions, Cats and Dogs, Influenza Epidemic 1918-1919, ASIDS, Homicides, Disasters, racism, Decommunization (I didn’t bother to Google that one), Medical Mistakes, and Eaten by Tigers”

Ok, I will stop here but I will let the lists continue on their own. But a warning to those who dare read on: You might be, statistically, risking dying from old age or confusion before getting to the end……………….

December 02, 2011

Taking the moral high ground:Swedish Pol Pot supporter apologizes for his mistake

By Nate Thayer

When Gunnar Bergstrom was a guest in Khmer Rouge Cambodia of Pol Pot in August 1978, the Swede enjoyed a rare meeting and dinner of oysters hosted by Pol Pot.

The meal followed a rare interview he and three politcal comrades from Sweden were given by the innaccesible and secretive Pol Pot who was then presiding over the death of more than a million and a half people that was actually escalating and under full rage at the time of that August 1978 feast. he returned to Europe and labeled talk about genocide under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge rule as a Western lie.

He has since fully publicly acknowledged his mistake, without mitigation or justification. he simply said he was wrong and asked for forgiveness. "For those still appalled by my support of the Khmer Rouge at the time, and especially those who suffered personally under that regime, I can only say I am sorry and ask for your forgiveness," Bergstrom says in his book, "Living Hell."

Full stop. He returned to Cambodia in the mid 2000's and publicly apologized again. He should be commended for having the moral courage to simply admit he was wrong, instead of the decades of silence or mitigation or justification that many others have chosen who shared his views and had a significant influence on public opinion and policy. He has shown moral courage that in contrast is absent from many of his contempraries who remain active in the Cambodian politcal debate today.

The young Swedish leftists shared Pol Pot's view, seeing the Khmer Rouge takeover as a revolution to transform Cambodia into a fairer society benefiting the poor.

Bergstrom has since realized he was mistaken about Pol Pot's brutal regime, and he has publicly retracted and apologized for his support and the propoganda influencee it had. he took the initiatiove to try and make amends.

"We had been fooled by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. We had supported criminals," he told The Associated Press from Stockholm. Gunnar Bergstrom has deep regret. He was one of only a handful of Westerners whom the Khmer Rouge allowed to visit during its 1975-79 hold on power. "For those still appalled by my support of the Khmer Rouge at the time, and especially those who suffered personally under that regime, I can only say I am sorry and ask for your forgiveness," Bergstrom says in his book, "Living Hell."

In 1978, Bergstrom was president of the Sweden-Kampuchea Friendship Association, a political group that supported Mao Zedong's China and influenced by the U.S. war in Vietnam. To Bergstrom, the Khmer Rouge revolution presented an "idealistic idea about an alternative society."

Bergstrom has shown courage and gained my respect for his very simple act of moral courage. He, in a way, is a hero in a sea of intellectual cowards that still remain mute in the wake of their shrill cries of support and defence of crimes against humanity. To them, it should be reminded, it is pretty simple: "I was wrong and I am sorry."

November 30, 2011

Khmer Rouge Apologist Noam Chomsky: An Offense to all who died under Pol Pot

A Review of his record to date

By Nate Thayer

Professor Noam Chomsky is a brilliant man. He is without question the world’s leading scholar on linguistics, a long deserved tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and speaks 32 languages. He so dominates the international field of linguistics, that he created another school of linguistic theory for the purpose of encouraging debate within his specialty.

However Chomsky is best known as a very active political critic. He refuses to attach an ideology to himself, but has described his politics in their past as similar to an Anarchist.

He is too smart to simply not understand the political consequences he has made a career out of espousing on the issue of culpability for crimes committed during Khmer Rouge rule. And they are nothing less than intellectually intentional, knowing lies designed to mislead people as to the true facts to further a pre-determined ideological agenda, parsing, obfuscating and intentionally deceiving people to wrongly attribute the origins, causes, responsibility and perpetrators of the Cambodian suffering. His writings on Cambodia have done more damage, through its surface logic, to allowing those responsible for mass murder to avoid facing justice, and to misdirect that responsibility on peripheral players in the 40 year old drama. Not only does he deem the architects of Cambodian suffering as the US government, but labels the intenrational independent media as willing accomplices.

In the June 25, 1977 issue of the “Nation” a popular left leaning magazine in the U.S., Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman authored “Distortions at Fourth Hand.”

In it, he denied the credibility of information leaking out of Cambodia of a bloodbath underway, and viciously attacked the authors of reportage suggesting many were dying and suffering under the Khmer Rouge. “The technical name for this farce is 'freedom of the press'. All are free to write as they wish: Fox Butterfield, with his ideological blinders, on the front page of the Times (daily circulation more than 800,000)…. that find only 'woes' and distress, reach a mass audience and become part of the established truth. In this way a 'line' is implanted in the public mind with all the effectiveness of a system of censorship, while the illusion of an open press and society is maintained. If dictators were smarter, they would surely use the American system of thought control and indoctrination…."

Chomsky called it "a campaign to reconstruct the history of these years so as to place the role of the United States in a more favorable light. The drab view of contemporary Vietnam provided by Butterfield and the establishment press helps to sustain the desired rewriting of history, asserting as it does the sad results of Communist success and American failure. Well suited for these aims are tales of Communist atrocities, which not only prove the evils of communism but undermine the credibility of those who opposed the war and might interfere with future crusades for freedom."

"It is in this context that we must view the recent spate of newspaper reports, editorials and books on Cambodia, a part of the world not ordinarily of great concern to the press. However, an exception is made when useful lessons may be drawn and public opinion mobilized in directions advantageous to the established order. Such didacticism often plays fast and loose with the truth.”

“For example, on April 8, 1977, The Washington Post devoted half a page to 'photographs believed to be the first of actual forced labor conditions in the countryside of Cambodia [to] have reached the West.' The pictures show armed soldiers guarding people pulling plows, others working fields, and one bound man (“It is not known if this man was killed,” the caption reads). Quite a sensational testimonial to Communist atrocities, but there is a slight problem. The Washington Post account of how they were smuggled out by a relative of the photographer who died in the escape is entirely fanciful. The pictures had appeared a year earlier in France, Germany and Australia, as well as in the Bangkok Post.” He suggested that “the series of pictures could have been taken in Thailand with the prime objective of destroying the image of the Socialist parties” before the election.”

He continued: “Even if the photographs had been authentic, we might ask why people should be pulling plows in Cambodia. The reason is clear, if unmentioned. The savage American assault on Cambodia did not spare the animal population. Hildebrand and Porter, in their Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, cite a Cambodian Government report of April 1976 that several hundred thousand draft animals were killed in the rural areas. The Post did not have to resort to probable fabrications to depict the facts.” Hildebrand and Porters book Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution was cited as quoting the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge themselves as to why slave labour under the KR was a myth created to serve American propaganda. “Hildebrand and Porter present a carefully documented study of the destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming it, giving a very favorable picture of their programs and policies, based on a wide range of sources.” Their book was a left wing diatribe that relied entirely on KR official propaganda documents and statements melded with anti--American propaganda. There was nothing remotely acceptable in its scholarship or methodology. Both authors admitted a number of years ago that their book had been discredited and distanced themselves from their own work.

“In his Foreword to Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, Asian scholar George Kahin observes that it is a book from which 'anyone who is interested in understanding the situation obtaining in Phnom Penh before and after the Lon Nol government's collapse and the character and programs of the Cambodian Government that has replaced it will, I am sure, be grateful…' But the mass media are not grateful for the Hildebrand-Porter message, and have shielded the general public from such perceptions of Cambodia.” Here Chomsky blames the media, again, as conspiring en masse to allow the public to hear the truth about the KR.

“In contrast, the media favorite, Barron and Paul's Murder of a Gentle Land: untold story of Communist Genocide in Cambodia (their subtitle), virtually ignores the U.S. Government role. When they speak of 'the murder of a gentle land,' they are not referring to B-52 attacks on villages or the systematic bombing and murderous ground sweeps by American troops or forces organized and supplied by the United States, in a land that had been largely removed from the conflict prior to the American attack. Their point of view can be predicted from the 'diverse sources' on which they relied: namely, 'informal briefings from specialists at the State and Defense Departments, the National Security Council and three foreign embassies in Washington.' Their 'Acknowledgements' mention only the expertise of Thai and Malaysian officials, U.S. Government Cambodian experts, and Father Ponchaud. They also claim to have analyzed radio and refugee reports.” In fact Barron and Paul’s book, widely vilified by the left ideologues when it came out, was the first to document widespread starvation, murder, human rights abuses, torture, and harsh central polices where people were dying from being turned into slave labor. It was widely accused for being a CIA funded propaganda tract. Its contents have almost wholly turned out to be remarkably accurate. In fact it relied almost exclusively on interviews with several thousand refugees who had managed to escape to Thailand and were in refugee camps on the Thai border. They were eyewitness accounts from inside KR Cambodia---sourcing that didn’t exist in either Chomsky or Porter and Hildebrand's books. Barron and Paul also included eyewitness reports from journalists who were held at the French embassy in Phnom Penh and saw the genesis of the transformation of Cambodia into the shocking central controlled policies that left nearly 2 million dead. Chomsky downplays these reports, cherry picking from those that, as journalists are supposed to do, only reported what they could confirm. Their scholarship collapses under the barest scrutiny. To cite a few cases, they state that among those evacuated from Phnom Penh, “virtually everybody saw the consequences of [summary executions] in the form of the corpses of men, women and children rapidly bloating and rotting in the hot sun,” citing, among others, J.J. Cazaux, who wrote, in fact, that “not a single corpse was seen along our evacuation route,” and that early reports of massacres proved fallacious (The Washington Post, May 9, 1975). They also cite The New York Times, May 9, 1975, where Sydney Shanberg wrote that “there have been unconfirmed reports of executions of senior military and civilian officials ... But none of this will apparently bear any resemblance to the mass executions that had been predicted by Westerners,” and that “Here and there were bodies, but it was difficult to tell if they were people who had succumbed to the hardships of the march or simply civilians and soldiers killed in the last battles.” Chomsky neglects to point out that the journalists were held hostage and Schanberg concluded they saw no corpses because the Khmer Rouge made sure they did not. Schanberg was also almost executed himself for seeing what little he did see. In the same article Chomsky cites from Cazaux, he fails to include the detailed account of the French surgeon at Calmette Hospital who came out with the last group of westerners, who said that he saw three hundred bodies with their throats cut in the central market. Chomsky goes on: “(Barron and Paul) do not mention the Swedish journalist, Olle Tolgraven, or Richard Boyle of Pacific News Service, the last newsman to leave Cambodia, who denied the existence of wholesale executions; nor do they cite the testimony of Father Jacques Engelmann, a priest with nearly two decades of experience in Cambodia, who was evacuated at the same time and reported that evacuated priests 'were not witness to any cruelties' and that there were deaths, but 'not thousands, as certain newspapers have written' (cited by Hildebrand and Porter).” Chomsky here refers to an article in the LA Times of May 9 which shows how he distorts, in what can only be intentional, the journalists account: “Phnom Penh was described by many of the returnees as a “dead city,” littered with decomposing bodies, and abandoned household goods and populated by a few forlorn pets and a few Khmer Rouge soldiers. One Frenchman said last Thursday the Khmer Rouge had come to his house and ordered him to leave or be shot. He recalled: “On the way to the embassy I saw several dead bodies rotting in the street. Some of them apparently had been shot, but some had their heads crushed and appeared to have been beaten to death.”

"A Swedish journalist, Olle Tolgraven of Swedish Broadcasting, said he did not believe there had been wholesale executions. But he said there was evidence the Khmer Rouge had shot people who refused to leave their homes in a mass evacuation ordered the first day of the takeover. This was corroborated by others. One Cambodian woman said many old people died on the trek out of the City “because it was too hard for them to walk.”

Chomsky and Herman continued to shift blame from the KR, tried to discredit reports suggesting KR atrocities, and cited without quotation media that he throughout uses as examples of a conspiracy of propaganda: “Before looking more closely at Ponchaud's book and its press treatment, we would like to point out that apart from Hildebrand and Porter there are many other sources on recent events in Cambodia that have not been brought to the attention of the American reading public. Space limitations preclude a comprehensive review, but such journals as the Far Eastern Economic Review, the London Economist, the Melbourne Journal of Politics, and others elsewhere, have provided analyses by highly qualified specialists who have studied the full range of evidence available, and who concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands; that these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent, where brutal revenge killings were aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from the American destruction and killing. These reports also emphasize both the extraordinary brutality on both sides during the civil war (provoked by the American attack) and repeated discoveries that massacre reports were false.”

Citing news reports that “repeated discoveries that massacre reports were false” is an outright fabrication. Just because the closed Cambodian borders made evidence difficult to confirm does not mean anyone was reporting they were outright false, save for Chomsky and his ilk. As Cambodia scholar Sopheal Ear points out: “Of course the respectable magazines that Chomsky and Herman cite (the Economist and the Far Eastern Economic Review) say no such thing, and if there had really been any 'discoveries that massacre reports were false' then Chomsky and the magazine in which his article appeared would have given us chapter and verse in type the size of tombstones."

"Chomsky leads the reader to believe that a well informed person, someone who reads prestigious news magazines like the Economist, who reads magazines targeted primarily at the wealthy, someone affluent and cultured, would not believe the stuff about democide, and that that business about democide was just lowbrow propaganda for the ignorant trailer trash masses. Chomsky uses the authority and prestige of these very reputable magazines to contradict reports of vast crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. He claims that these are 'conflicting reports' that justify disbelief in the alleged crimes of the Khmer Rouge, that these very respectable magazines endorse his position (without actually admitting that that is his position)."

There was of course no such evidence, and no such endorsement. When one chases down these citations, one is led to an article by Nayan Chanda, who thought that the guilt of the Khmer Rouge was not proven. Chomsky and Herman leads the reader to believe them in confident possession of evidence proving the innocence of the Khmer Rouge….. When Chomsky and Herman tell us of 'discoveries that massacre reports were false' this leads the reader to expect (from the context that this is a criticism of press reporting) that some of the many horrific massacre reports he has read in the press were discovered to be false, and that the terribly biased press failed to broadcast this news. The reader expects that if he looks up these sources he will find important neglected news, some dramatic newsworthy facts that disproves some of these terrible stories, and thus casts doubt on all these stories of horror, terror and mass murder under the Khmer Rouge.”

In fact the Economist wrote an article endorsing Ponchaud's estimates of hundreds of thousands executed, a million or so dying of brutal mistreatment. Chomsky presented the Far Eastern Economic Review as confidently denying the possibility that the killings were vastly higher, but Chanda specifically denies such knowledge and confidence. Chanda's claim was not that he had evidence that the Khmer Rouge were innocent, but that if we ignore all the evidence indicating they are guilty, there is not much evidence that they are guilty — a position that might perhaps have been defensible when Chanda wrote in 1976, but had become untenable when Chomsky and Herman wrote in 1977. The refugee reports of casual murder, massacres, and frequent forgetfulness of the need to feed and water the slaves, were confirmed by massacres on the border.

Chomsky then writes:”They also testify to the extreme unreliability of refugee reports, and the need to treat them with great caution, a fact that we and others have discussed elsewhere (cf. Chomsky: At War with Asia, on the problems of interpreting reports of refugees from American bombing in Laos). Refugees are frightened and defenseless, at the mercy of alien forces. They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocutors wish to hear. While these reports must be considered seriously, care and caution are necessary. Specifically, refugees questioned by Westerners or Thais have a vested interest in reporting atrocities on the part of Cambodian revolutionaries, an obvious fact that no serious reporter will fail to take into account.”

In fact refugee reports are highly credible. Refugees are not trained or in a physical or mental state to concoct false political conspiracies that hold water. Refugees are credible because they come across in separate groups or alone from different areas of the border and originating from different parts of Cambodia at different times for different reasons. It would be impossible for them to conspire together to tell a consistent false story.

Chomsky uses official KR statements and propaganda as “credible documentation” while dismissing the eyewitness accounts of people fleeing abominable conditions and further states “Washington is the torture and political murder capital of the world.”

When it comes to death from disease, Chomsky again blames the Americans: “though there was ‘a big death toll from sickness’— surely a direct consequence, in large measure, of the devastation caused by the American attack.” The American bombing had stopped 2 years prior to KR victory, and he fails to even mention the effect of the evacuation of 2 million people from the cities as a possible contributing factor.

As to the toll of central policy of the KR resulting in people killed Chomsky says this, quoting Ponchaud, the French priest: “Here we read the 'Most foreign experts on Cambodia and its refugees believe at least 1.2 million persons have been killed or have died as a result of the Communist regime since April 17, 1975' (UPI, Boston Globe, April 17, 1977). No source is given, but it is interesting that a 1.2 million estimate is attributed by Ponchaud to the American Embassy (Presumably Bangkok).”

He continues outright dismissing reports of mass deaths as credible using no sourcing to attribute it to: “a completely worthless source, as the historical record amply demonstrates. The figure bears a suggestive similarity to the prediction by U.S. officials at the war's end that 1 million would die in the next year.” In fact in 1976 Time magazine estimated about six hundred thousand. In 1977 Ponchaud estimated about one million two hundred thousand wrongful deaths, Barron and Paul the same. In 1978 US senator George McGovern estimated two and a half million. The universally accepted figure, after forensic, demographic, and scientific analysis now puts the figure at 1.7 million deaths in the KR 3 year reign.

Chomsky doesn’t stop there: “In the New York Times Magazine, May 1, 1977, Robert Moss (editor of a dubious offshoot of Britain's Economist called “Foreign Report” which specializes in sensational rumors from the world's intelligence agencies) asserts that “Cambodia's pursuit of total revolution has resulted, by the official admission of its Head of State, Khieu Samphan, in the slaughter of a million people.” Moss informs us that the source of this statement is Barron and Paul, who claim that in an interview with the Italian weekly Famiglia Cristiana Khieu Samphan stated that more than a million died during the war, and that the population had been 7 million before the war and is now 5 million. Even if one places some credence in the reported interview nowhere in it does Khieu Samphan suggest that the million postwar deaths were a result of official policies (as opposed to the lag effects of a war that left large numbers ill, injured, and on the verge of starvation). The “slaughter” by the Khmer Rouge is a Moss- New York Times creation. Christian Science Monitor editorial states: 'Reports put the loss of life as high as 2 million people out of 7.8 million total.' Again, there is no source, but we will suggest a possibility directly. The New York Times analysis of 'two years after the Communist victory' goes still further. David Andelman, May 2, 1977, speaks without qualification of 'the purges that took hundreds of thousands of lives in the aftermath of the Communist capture of Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975.'”

The experts who actually made the study where both the books of Ponchaud and Barron and Paul, which Chomsky condemns as US propoganda and turned out to be an underestimate of the deaths confirmed in the 1990’s up to date in exhaustive research.

Chomsky doesn’t seem satisfied dismissing death tolls out of hand, offering no independent evidence, simply attacking the sourcing as politically motivated lies.” Even the U.S. Government sources on which journalists often uncritically rely advance no such claim, to our knowledge. In fact, even Barron and Paul claim only that “100,000 or more” were killed in massacres and executions — they base their calculations on a variety of interesting assumptions, among them, that all military men, civil-servants and teachers were targeted for execution; curiously, their “calculations” lead them to the figure of 1.2 million deaths as a result of “actions” of the Khmer Rouge governing authorities, by January 1, 1977 (“at a very minimum”); by a coincidence, the number reported much earlier by the American Embassy, according to Ponchaud. Elsewhere in the press, similar numbers are bandied about, with equal credibility.” The figures cited, after extrapolation from a broad range of available but limited sources—but qualified by the authors as such--were: Barron and Paul estimate: 400,000 or more during the first exodus; 430,000 or more from disease and starvation during the latter half of 1975; 250,000 or more from disease and starvation in 1976; 100,000 or more in massacres and by execution; and 20,000 or more during escape attempts. While these figures during this period are higher than now believed, they reflect the pattern and, aggregately, reflect the final death toll.

Again Chomsky attributed suffering under the DK, not to the KR, but to the American policy toward Cambodia.” It is difficult to convey the deep cynicism of this all-too-typical reporting which excises from history the American role in turning peaceful Cambodia into a land of massacre, starvation and disease. While the editors prate about morality, people are dying in Cambodia as a direct result of the policies that they supported, and, indeed concealed. Hildebrand and Porter quote a Western doctor in Phnom Penh on the mass starvation that resulted from the American war: 'as well as knocking off a generation of young men, the war is knocking off a generation of children'—those who will die from the permanent damage suffered from severe malnutrition, one small part of the American legacy to this “lovely land.””

Here he blames not just any problems in post KR Cambodia on the US, but on a vast conspiracy of silence by the media: ”To appreciate fully the cynicism of the press and editorial comments, it is necessary to recall the role of the American mass media in supporting the “secret war” against Cambodia. Prior to the Nixon-Kissinger administration, Cambodian villages had been subject to U.S. or U.S.-supported armed attack, invariably denied, but on occasion later conceded when it was discovered that Western observers were present. The massive assault against Cambodia began in March 1969, when the “secret” B-52 raids were launched. In the following weeks, the Cambodian Government made repeated efforts to bring the facts to the attention of the international press. Prince Sihanouk appealed to the press to make public these “criminal attacks” on “peaceful Cambodian farmers” and to “publicize abroad this very clear stand of Cambodia” in opposing all bombings on Cambodian territory under whatever pretext.” In January 1970, his government released an official White Book giving details of U.S. attacks on civilians up to May 1969 including names, places, dates; figures and photographs. All of this was concealed by the American press, which was later to claim that it was Richard Nixon who kept the 1969 bombardment from the press and the American people. There was one notable exception, a New York Times report by William Beecher (May 9, 1969), headed “Raids in Cambodia by U.S. Unprotested,” which reported B-52 raids on “Vietcong and North Vietnamese supply dumps and base camps “in Cambodia,” citing U.S, sources and disregarding Sihanouk’s impassioned protest against the murder of “Khmer peasants, women and children in particular””

Here Chomsky belittles comparisons to fascist Germany to the suffering at the time of his writing was underway on a full scale. His argument is that since the source was not the KR themselves, rather an independent newspaper report, it wasn’t credible: “Lacouture does in fact compare the Khmer Rouge to the Nazis. He states that Ponchaud cites “telling articles” from a Cambodian Government newspaper and quotes a paragraph which states that “we will choose only the fruit that suit us perfectly,” as distinct from the Vietnamese, who “have removed only the rotten fruit.” Commenting on this passage Lacouture states “Perhaps Beria would not have dared to say this openly; Himmler might have done so.” And he then concludes that the Cambodian revolution is “worthy of Nazi Gauleiters.”

The newspaper report that elicited these judgments, on which the press uncritically relies, does appear in Ponchaud's book. The source, however, is not a Cambodian Government newspaper, but a Thai newspaper, a considerable difference. The quoted paragraph was written by a Thai reporter who claims to have had an interview with a Khmer Rouge official. How seriously would we regard a critical account of the United States in a book by a hostile European leftist based on a report in Pravda of a statement allegedly made by an unnamed American official? The analogy is precise. Why then should we rest any judgment on Ponchaud's account of a Thai report of an alleged statement by an unnamed Khmer Rouge official? What is certain is that the basis for Lacouture's accusations, cited above, disappears when the quotes are properly attributed: to a Thai reporter, not a Cambodian Government newspaper.”

Instead, he makes a comparison to the French revolution, adding the suffering in France was considerably less than suffering inflicted by the US. “But if postwar Cambodia is more similar to France after liberation, where many thousands of people were massacred within a few months under far less rigorous conditions than those left by the American war, then perhaps a rather different judgment is in order. That the latter conclusion may be more nearly correct is suggested by the analyses mentioned earlier.”

Again, he claims there is a conspiracy by the media in cahoots with the US to deceive the public of the truth, which he cites as more accurately reflected by Porter and Hildebrand—an outright ideological tract with no acceptable scholarly methodology, an apologist tract for communist theory in which both authors later personally disavowed themselves from their own work. ”What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasizing alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial U.S. role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered. Evidence that focuses on the American role, like the Hildebrand and Porter volume, is ignored, not on the basis of truthfulness or scholarship but because the message is unpalatable.”

Ad infinitum:” It is a fair generalization that the larger the number of deaths attributed to the Khmer Rouge, and the more the U.S. role is set aside, the larger the audience that will be reached. The Barron-Paul volume is a third-rate propaganda tract, but its exclusive focus on Communist terror assures it a huge audience.”

He concludes the conspiracy chain of propaganda that removes culpability from the Khmer Rouge and puts it on the free press as a willing vehicle of the US government lies: Reports of” large numbers executed gave a 'Left' authentication of Communist evil that assured a quantum leap to the mass audience unavailable to Hildebrand and Porter. Contrary facts are generally ignored or inadequately reported in favor of a useful lesson…The chain of transmission runs from refugees (or Thai or U.S. officials), to Ponchaud, to the New York Review, to the press, where a mass audience is reached and 'facts' are established that enter the approved version of history.”

Chomsky has written numerous tracts and books defending his position since, including “Manufacturing Consent”, published alongside Edward Herman in 1988, a work Chomsky boasts is “a rare study that does not contain errors”. He and Herman also wrote “After the Cataclysm,” which said “In the first place, is it proper to attribute deaths from malnutrition and disease to Cambodian authorities?”

Both books are on the Cambodian period under the Khmer Rouge and the role of the media in intentionally writing propaganda in the service of the US government.

Other gems: “If a serious study … is someday undertaken, it may well be discovered … that the Khmer Rouge programmes elicited a positive response … because they dealt with fundamental problems rooted in the feudal past and exacerbated by the imperial system.… Such a study, however, has yet to be undertaken.”

And: “New York Times' analysis of 'conditions in Indochina two years after the end of the war there.' Nor is there any discussion in the Times of the 'case of the missing bloodbath', although forecasts of a holocaust were urged by the U.S. leadership, official experts and the mass media over the entire course of the war in justifying our continued military presence. The technical name for this farce is 'freedom of the press'. All are free to write as they wish: Fox Butterfield, with his ideological blinders, on the front page of the Times (daily circulation more than 800,000)”

Chomsky and Herman use Hildebrand and Porter’s Starvation and Revolution as its most credible source. A brief examination of it reveals it for what it is. Just as Hildebrand and Porter had nothing negative to say about the Khmer Rouge, Chomsky and Herman had nothing negative to say about Hildebrand and Porter.

Describing the reports of atrocities in Cambodia as a "systematic process of mythmaking." They assert that reports of starvation in Cambodia are incorrect: "It is the officially inspired propaganda of starvation for which no proof has been produced... Thus the starvation myth has come full circle to haunt its authors." The Khmer Rouge were implementing a "coherent, well-developed plan for developing the economy."

On the evacuation of the cities: “"It is the officially inspired propaganda of starvation for which no proof has been produced... Thus the starvation myth has come full circle to haunt its authors."

By 1978 Hildebrand backed off from his own work, but Chomsky didn’t. “ON CBS 60 Minutes Hildebrand said: My... my only plea is for some degree of balance in assessing the human suffering that undoubtedly still exists in Cambodia."

“In after the Cataclysm” written after the KR fell from power, Chomsky and Herman continued: “"The ferocious U.S. attack on Indochina left the countries [of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia] devastated, facing almost insuperable problems. The agricultural systems of these peasant societies were seriously damaged or destroyed... With the economies in ruins, the foreign aid that kept much of the population alive terminated, and the artificial colonial implantations no longer functioning, it was a condition of survival to turn (or return) the populations to productive work. The victors in Cambodia undertook drastic and often brutal measures to accomplish this task, simply forcing the urban population into the countryside where they were compelled to live the lives of poor peasants, now organized in a decentralized system of communes. At heavy cost, these measures appear to have overcome the dire and destructive consequences of the U.S. war by 1978."

They wrote: “"While all of the countries of Indochina have been subjected to endless denunciations in the West for their 'loathsome' qualities and unaccountable failure to find humane solutions to their problems, Cambodia was a particular target of abuse. In fact, it became virtually a matter of dogma in the West that the regime was the very incarnation of evil with no redeeming qualities, and that the handful of demonic creatures who had somehow taken over the country were systematically massacring and starving the population."

Ponchaud wrote later of Chomsky’s citing of his work: "Even before this book was translated it was sharply criticized by Mr. Noam Chomsky and Mr. Gareth Porter. These two 'experts' on Asia claim that I am mistakenly trying to convince people that Cambodia was drowned in a sea of blood after the departure of the last American diplomats. They say there have been no massacres, and they lay the blame for the tragedy of the Khmer people on the American bombings. They accuse me of being insufficiently critical in my approach to the refugee's accounts. For them, refugees are not a valid source...After an investigation of this kind, it is surprising to see that 'experts' who have spoken to few if any refugees should reject their very significant place in any study of modern Cambodia. These experts would rather base their arguments on reasoning: if something seems impossible to their personal logic, then it doesn't exist. Their only sources for evaluation are deliberately chosen official statements. Where is that critical approach which they accuse others of not having?"

“Referring to Chomsky, Ponchaud writes:"He has made it my duty to 'stem the flood of lies' about Cambodia -- particularly, according to him, those propagated by Anthony Paul and John Barron in 'Murder of a Gentle Land.'"

"Mr. Gareth Porter also criticized my book very sharply during a congressional hearing on the subject of human rights in Cambodia, and argued that I was trying to convince people that Cambodia was drowned in a sea of blood after the departure of the last American diplomats. He denied that a general policy of purge was put into effect and considered that the tragedy through which the Khmer people are now living should mainly be attributed to the American bombings. He censured me for lacking a critical approach in my use of the refugee accounts, on the ground that they were not credible because the refugees were deliberately trying to blacken the regime they had fled.In the beginning, I was not opposed to the Khmer revolution... I welcomed the revolutionaries' victory as the only possible means of bringing Cambodia out of its misery. But after making a careful and full study... I was compelled to conclude, against my will, that the Khmer revolution is irrefutably the bloodiest of our century. A year after the publication of my book I can find no reason to alter my judgment."

Other Khmer Rouge scholars on the left have refuted their earlier sympathetic writing which Chomsky used and still uses as primary sourcing. Ben Kiernan reconsidered his position shortly after the publication of After the Cataclysm. In the Bulletin of Concerned Asia Scholars, October-December 1979, the editors of that publication asked him why he had "changed his mind" and had become critical of the Khmer Rouge regime. "I was late in realizing the extent of the tragedy in Kampuchea," he wrote. He continued: "I was wrong about an important aspect of Kampuchean communism: the brutal authoritarian trend within the revolutionary movement after 1973 was not simply a grassroots reaction, and expression of popular outrage at the killing and destruction of the countryside by US bombs, although that helped it along decisively." He echoes this statement in Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea 1942 - 1981. "In analyzing the reasons for continuing violence after the war, I failed to identify the deliberate, if hampered, activities of the Pol Pot group."

Leftist scholar Michael Vickery after 1979 revised his pro-Khmer Rouge stance and Chomsky and Herman adopted it. If the Khmer Rouge were bad, it was because the U.S. deliberately made them that way. Thus, they repeat Michael Vickery's claims that US policy in Cambodia was driven by a desire to "'insure that the post-war revolutionary government be extremely brutal, doctrinaire, and frightening to its neighbors, rather than a moderate socialism to which the Thai, for example, might look with envy.'"

So even after the KR were overthrown and the evidence was clear of the barbarity they imposed Chomsky continued with his same theme of apologetic excuses and misdirected blame. "If a serious study of the impact of Western imperialism on Cambodian peasant life is someday undertaken, it may well be discovered that the violence lurking behind the Khmer smile…is not a reflection of obscure traits in peasant culture and psychology, but is the direct and understandable response to the violence of the imperial system, and that its current manifestations are a no less direct and understandable response to the still more concentrated and extreme savagery of a U.S. assault that may in part have been designed to evoke this very response, as we have noted. Such a study may also show that the Khmer Rouge programs elicited a positive response from some sectors of the Cambodian peasantry because they dealt with fundamental problems rooted in the feudal past and exacerbated by the imperial system with its final outburst of uncontrolled barbarism."

In 1988, Chomsky and Herman published 1988 “Manufacturing Consent”, a tract linking a supine willing ‘free press’ to carry out the propaganda orders of their western governments.

"The CIA, in its demographic study in 1980, claims that Pol Pot killed 50-100,000 people and attributes most deaths to the Vietnamese invasion, also denying flatly the atrocities of 1978, which were by far the worst (that's the source of the famous piles of skulls, etc.; these became known after the Vietnamese invasion in 1979, and were certainly known to the CIA). Michael Vickery has written about the CIA study, suggesting that it was tailored to fit the fact that the US was tacitly supporting Pol Pot in '78 and later... Vickery estimates about 700,000 deaths 'above the normal' in the Pol Pot years -- which, if accurate, would be about the same as deaths during the US war (the first phase of the 'Decade of Genocide,' as 1969-79 is called by the one independent government analysis, Finland). For that period, the CIA estimates 600,000 deaths. The Yale Genocide project (Ben Kiernan and others) gives higher estimates, about 1.5 million. In fact, no one knows. No one ever knows in such cases, within quite a broad range. When numbers are put forth with any confidence, and without a big plus-or-minus, you can be sure that there is an ideological agenda, in any such case. Demographic analyses are very weak."

They continue:” "US intelligence took a much more skeptical position than we did on refugee reports, but anyone who is even marginally serious about the matter understands all this -- of course, not those who don't give a damn about the suffering that refugees report, but are merely using it as an ideological weapon, specifically, as a justification for brutal atrocities. Recall that that was exactly the crucial issue at the time, as charges about the KR and the Vietnamese, many of them fabrications at a level that would have impressed Stalin (as we demonstrated), were being used as a justification for US atrocities in Central America and elsewhere. But credible evidence of atrocities existed then, which is why we condemned the brutality and crimes of the Khmer Rouge, and a lot more evidence came to light after we wrote, and after the reports of Ponchaud and State Department intelligence that we cited..."

Then they try to ignore some of there now indefensible claims and rewrite their own record.” "You might recall, perhaps, that we were probably the only commentators to rely on the most knowledgeable source, State Department intelligence. Our conclusion at the time was that it was probably the most reliable as well as by far the best informed, and subsequent revelations support that tentative judgment. They were avoided in the mainstream commentary because their conclusions didn't fit the propaganda line that was required to exploit the misery of the Cambodians to justify subjecting millions of other people to comparable misery, in Central America and elsewhere. Presumably that is also why the CIA demographic study of 1980, regarded as authoritative by US government specialists, is totally ignored..."

"The accepted view is that Cambodia was a gentle country of smiling Buddhists until the Khmer Rouge swept to power in April 1975. This is a fabrication," said Professor Noam Chomsky, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of Manufacturing Consent, a book examining media misrepresentation of world affairs. "There were countless atrocities before 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, and after 1979, when the Vietnamese defeated the Khmer Rouge, that are simply not mentioned. Why? Because the West was involved."

Chomsky goes on to add that:

"There is a Cambodian Genocide Act in [the US] Congress and it refers to crimes from 17 April, 1975, to 9 January, 1979," said Prof. Chomsky. "That is, it excludes the period when the US was supporting atrocities before and after Pol Pot."

To this day Chomsky defends every word he has written: "I am very pleased that there has been such a hysterical reaction to these writings. They've been analyzed with a fine tooth comb to try to find some error, and to my knowledge, the end result is that not even a misplaced comma has been found. True, a lot of errors have been found in fabricated material attributed to me, but that's a sign of the desperation of the apologists for state violence. If you know of an exception, I'd appreciate it if you'd inform me. I haven't yet seen one."

He continues in an interview: “"I should add that I don't pay attention to what appears on the internet sites that you are referring to... But if you do find this interesting, I'd suggest that you switch to sites that are at a similar intellectual level but a much higher moral level: I have in mind neo-Nazi and neo-Stalinist sites, which I presume exist. There I suppose you'll find very similar arguments: denunciations of those who condemned Nazi and Stalinist crimes on the basis of the terror and atrocities of resistance forces and the horrible aftermath of the defeat of fascism and the collapse of the USSR... But the neo-Nazis and neo-Stalinists are on a far higher moral level, for the obvious reason: fortunately, they are in no position to exploit the terror of the resistance and the horrendous aftermath in order to justify, and carry out, terrible crimes. That is, they were unable to sink to the depravity of those whose sites you are reading, who exploit the suffering for which they share considerable responsibility in order to impose misery on others, to protect them from 'the Pol Pot left' in El Salvador (priests organizing peasants, for example), or from the 'Communists' elsewhere -- exactly as we wrote in the 70s, and as has been happening since."

In October 1990 in a letter to the editor in a British newspaper Chomsky wrote a reply to a criticism: Sir: Douglas Hurd (12 October) writes that as an “apologist” for the Khmer Rouge, I “condemned reports of Khmer Rouge atrocities” as fabrications. There is a particle of truth in his statement: I did expose fabrications as fabrications, as in many other cases, e.g. vast exaggerations of the death toll due to US bombing in Cambodia - an exposure which, for some reason, has never elicited any criticism. The rest is a recurrent fantasy that has regularly been refuted in detail, only to surface in some new version. It is noteworthy that despite the hysteria that these exposures have aroused, no error has ever been discovered in them, a fact noted in the scholarly literature. The facts are easily checked.”

As recently as 2006 Chomsky wrote on his 30 years of denial of the Khmer Rouge culpability in crimes against humanity”

“I know nothing about Bruce Sharp, and have no time to access the link or in fact anything from the huge torrent of charges about Cambodia that derive from one of many industries of denunciation, from many different quarters. They would take 48 hours a day if I bothered with them. No one does that, or is expected to, in professional life either. It would be an impossible and pointless task, for anyone who does anything in the least controversial. In the case of the Cambodia industry, I did respond to much of the hysteria and deceit elicited by what Edward Herman and I wrote (as did he), but I stopped paying attention years ago because the industry was simply re-cycling charges that we had already answered. However, if someone wants to bring something specific to my attention, I do respond. As I will show below, the one excerpt from Sharp's article below keeps to the standards of extreme dishonestly of the industry.

It is interesting that in the reams of industry denunciations brought to my attention, no one has found anything mistaken or even misleading in the 1977 review-article or in our follow-up chapter in Political Economy of Human Rights (PEHR) or in anything else we have written on the matter jointly or individually. If you (or anyone) thinks there is something else in Sharp's comments that merits attention, then I'll be happy to consider it and respond, if you send it to me, either here or privately, and I presume Ed Herman would be too. But no one, ever, can be expected to respond to what is posted somewhere or even appears in print. To repeat, no one ever is expected to do that, whether in professional or political life, and certainly not when it becomes an industry -- in this case, an extremely interesting industry, casting a dazzling light on the deeply rooted imperial mentality and the dedication to serve state power and atrocities. “

There is really not much needs to add to Chomsky’s own indictment of himself. He owes not just Cambodians an apology, but one to the importance of intellectual honesty itself he has tarnished.

By Paul McCann

The (London) Independent

Monday 25 May 1998

Nate Thayer is the kind of reporter that makes idealistic youngsters want to be journalists. He has risked his life in jungles, crossed the front lines of a civil war, been expelled from his home for exposing corrupt ministers and made secret rendezvous with genocidal killers. All for what is universally acknowledged to be the scoop of the decade - finding Pol Pot.

Now his lustre has been burnished all the brighter by his refusal to kow-tow to the might of the American TV network ABC. Furthermore he has become the first person in 57 years to turn down a prestigious Peabody award because it would have been shared with what he believes is a duplicitous media monster.

When he found the hidden Khmer leader last July, Thayer was described as having spent 10 years on the trail of Pol Pot.

"In fact that is rather a lot of hype," he says. "It's not like I had an obsession with Pol Pot. I was a Cambodian correspondent and lived there for six years. I also lived in Thailand for another five years so obviously there were plenty of other Cambodian and Asian stories that I covered.

"But I had always thought that Pol Pot was one of the last great interviews in the world. Here was a household name the world over who had never explained himself. He was perhaps the most effective 'secret leader' of the twentieth century.

"So all the time I lived in Cambodia and Thailand I kept one eye on Pol Pot. I made numerous trips into the jungle and built up contacts with Khmer Rouge leaders. And I made constant requests for access or an interview with Pol Pot.

"The break came in June 1997 when I was expelled from Cambodia for exposing connections between the Prime Minister and heroin traffickers. I decided to write a book so I spent a lot of time just sitting in a room with the Khmer Rouge's clandestine radio station on in the background. I heard then that the defence minister had been deemed a traitor and executed so I immediately went to my Khmer Rouge contacts who told me about serious infighting within the leadership and that Pol Pot had been overthrown.

"They even announced Pot's overthrow on the radio but no one believed them and that became the basis for my argument for getting access. No one would believe he had been overthrown unless a western journalist got in to prove it.

"From there I began the process of getting into one of the most impenetrable places in the world. The only foreigners to have been there before were the three guys who were kidnapped and executed. It was made all the harder because last July a civil war broke out in Phnom Penh and I had to fly to Bangkok and try from there by illegally crossing the border, not to mention the front lines of the Phnom Penh civil war and the front lines of the Khmer Rouge civil war.

"Once me and my cameraman were in a hotel over the border I had to phone a number in Europe to tell them my room number before being infiltrated into the jungle.

Thayer never did actually interview the leader responsible for the deaths of an estimated one million Cambodians. Instead, he filmed two hours of Pol Pot being denounced at a classic Maoist show trial.

Nevertheless, his story was dynamite, and as soon as it became known that he had footage, pictures and a story he was bombarded with hundreds of calls from news organisations. His main priority was to have the print story go in the Far Eastern Economic Review, which he had worked for as a freelancer for years and which had supported him for six months while he tried to get to Pol Pot in the jungle.

But he sold the North American television rights to his footage to ABC for $350,000 - "Mainly because ABC's Ted Koppel is as good as it gets on American TV. He seemed like the last honourable guy."

But now Thayer is seriously pissed off at ABC. The network's PR department got hold of the footage and did a major number on it. They made enhanced video-grabs which they gave to newspapers under an "ABC Exclusive" tag. This meant that, using ABC's released material, the New York Times was able to run Thayer's story before he had even started writing for the Economic Review. And by putting out the video grabs and downloading images onto its Web site, ABC ruined Thayer's chances of selling the stills from his trip into the jungle.

"Basically they said 'f*** you' to my lawyers because they knew their lawyers could eat a freelancer alive," says Thayer. "It was an outrageous ethical violation. They then refused to pay me my agreed fee until I signed something saying that they had done nothing wrong. It took 10 months to get my money and they only paid up because they knew when I had won the Peabody that it would turn into a PR nightmare."

ABC claims that its pre-broadcast publicity was perfectly normal behaviour and Thayer was naive for not understanding this.

Thayer believes the network's behaviour speaks volumes about the state of US television news. "ABC have one correspondent for the whole of Asia so they take freelancers' work and try to take credit for it. The function of people like Koppel is to prove that there is a serious side.

"But in reality to them the function of journalism in a free society is no more than delivering audiences to advertisers."

November 27, 2011

'We are the World!’

By Nate Thayer

After threatening to assassinate American civilians, the Khmer Rouge leader continued. “Why don’t we join hands in national reconciliation. Join together! We are with you, the West!” he said, growing increasingly animated, half breaking into song. “‘We are the World!’ Who is that singer? Johnny Jackson? Like he says, ‘We are the world!’ Let’s join together!”

(Copyright Nate Thayer. All Rights Reserved. Excerpts from unpublished manuscript “Sympathy for the Devil: A Journalist’s Memoir from Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.” No republication in whole or part without express written permission from the author.)

By Nate Thayer

A non-descript Khmer Rouge operative, dressed in civilian clothes was standing in the hallway outside my seedy hotel room in the still dark hours before dawn in The Thai border town of Surin. He waved me out urgently, nervously checking to see that the hallways were clear and I accompanied him at a pace too fast to be inconspicuous through the hotel lobby outside to a beat up pickup truck with a Thai civilian in the driver’s seat who refused to identify himself. The truck had Thai civilian license plates. Tuoch, the Khmer Rouge agent, refused to tell me where we were going or with whom I was scheduled to meet. “You will see,” he said solemnly. He probably didn’t even know himself. He would not have had to be instructed to be vague. His mission was only to retrieve me from the hotel and deliver me safely to Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia without drawing the attention of anybody. In late July 1996, now more than ever, the Khmer Rouge believed that enemies were everywhere and they were right.

Life for the Khmer Rouge by mid 1996 was a far cry from the previous years, where hundreds of millions of dollars of Chinese military hardware was trucked across these borders, coordinated by Thai military intelligence units, and with the political backing of the United States, and more than 120 member countries of the United Nations. Khmer Rouge leaders had compounds in the relative luxury of Thai provincial capitals and travelled in chauffeured cars to Bangkok. Now they rarely got permission from the Thais to leave their isolated jungle hideouts.

The pickup truck was driven by a very nervous Thai civilian with a mobile phone that would ring periodically and he would grunt a few responses and hang up. He insisted he was not a serving military officer and I believed him. He was nervous, grim-faced, eyes darting and reluctant to utter a word, driving way to fast, and clearly uncomfortable.

Thai spooks were much more relaxed. They had carte blanche to travel these border regions still under Thai martial law since it was infested by armed guerrillas of the Communist Party of Thailand only a few years prior, and Thai military intelligence could pull rank with the flash of an ID card, getting a no-questions asked salute, and look of fear at any military checkpoint. I had seen it many times. This fellow I was with had no permission to transport a foreigner through the Thai frontier, and certainly not to smuggle him across national borders into a zone controlled by an armed Cambodian rebel faction at war with the central government in Phnom Penh of which Thailand had formal diplomatic relations. The Thai government was constantly proclaiming they had no contact with the Khmer Rouge, and now, except for the legitimate national security functions of gathering intelligence, monitoring Khmer Rouge activities, and keeping their options open, they were largely complying.

He drove many miles out of the way through a network of back roads, bordered by endless rice paddies, specifically to avoid Thai military checkpoints. I wrote down every turn, drawing a map in my notebook, in case I needed to find my way back—or was ever inclined to sneak back this way again.

After a couple hours, the pickup turned down a dirt path into a small non-descript Thai village and pulled over at a thatched roof noodle and cigarette stall. The tinted one-way windows of the pickup shielded me from the solemn but prying eyes of the half dozen peasant farmers milling about. This was a village that knew well to look the other way when strangers came through. After chatting with the vendor for a minute, the driver hopped back in and we drove deeper into rice fields down rutted dirt tracks used only by water buffalo and farm equipment.

We pulled over under a lone majestic banyan tree amongst the rice paddies and waited. I was told to stay hidden in the truck. I was given a baseball hat with a Kiss rock-and-roll band logo of an extended tongue for disguise, sunglasses, and told to wrap a checkered traditional Cambodian scarf around my face.

Churning up dust in its wake, snaking through the rice paddies, a battered pick-up truck with no license plate and tinted windows approached from the east out of the jungle shrouded mountain ridge, which marked the natural Cambodian border a couple kilometers in the distance. It pulled next to us and a uniformed Khmer Rouge soldier got out, greeting my companions. With little small talk, I was promptly ordered in the cramped, small rear bench seat behind the driver, my 6-2 inch frame stuffed awkwardly like a sardine, my knees bent up to my chin. The Khmer Rouge soldier was at the helm, his face serious, a Chinese AK-47 propped by the gearshift, young Tuoch, who had knocked on my hotel door that morning, in the passenger seat. We sped toward the tree line. The rice fields devolved into now unproductive, fallow fields. This was always a mark of danger. As we neared the actual ill-defined border, fields were abandoned because of recent fighting. Landmines were everywhere. These were always eerie, peculiar scenes. Stark in their silence, abandoned rice fields are the sign that civilians have fled, giving up their most precious holdings—literally the source of the food on their table. Things have to be pretty bad for rice fields to be abandoned.

Periodically, artillery would fall, or clashes would break out, villagers killed or maimed, and they would retreat from their homes, waiting for the war that each side had nothing to offer them, to end. Hand painted blood-red skull and crossbones signs nailed to trees were everywhere, a crude warning to local peasants of landmines or booby traps. These increased proportionately to the importance of the area—either as a strategic road or military base or village of families of Khmer Rouge soldiers.

We drove for miles down dirt tracks through these abandoned, neglected fields, empty and silent, toward the tree line mountain escarpment on the horizon. Trees always marked the border between Thailand and Cambodia. In these parts of the Thai-Cambodia frontier if there were trees, there were guerrilla soldiers hiding in them.

We had one more obstacle ahead, I was told—an isolated Thai military checkpoint. The Khmer Rouge driver checked that I was sufficiently scrunched up in the back, hat and sunglasses on, traditional Cambodian scarf wrapped around my head, with only my eyes exposed. “Tell them you are visiting your family, if anyone asks,” he instructed, rather preposterously. The checkpoint consisted of a single raw cut log suspended parallel across and above the road, weighted on one end by concrete and tied by rope on a post on the opposite side of the dirt track. A bamboo hut was beside it. Next to it, in the mid morning sun, a single Thai soldier lay asleep in his hammock, his M-16 assault rifle propped against a tree. He didn’t even rise as Tuoch got out of the car to lift the barricade. We had now entered Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia. The Thai never suspected an American was being smuggled through. The explosions of incoming artillery followed the rumbling of their firing further down the mountain escarpment ahead.

The guerrilla stronghold on a high ridge of northern Cambodia’s Dongruk Mountain offered stunning vistas of tropical jungles and besieged villages encircled by bunkers and land mines. Grim faced Khmer Rouge soldiers, many of them missing limbs and walking on crude hand carved wooden crutches, eyed me suspiciously, trying not to be obvious in the curiosity at the first westerner they had ever seen at their village.

One hut housed sophisticated radio equipment, its roof criss-crossed with antennas. Amputees in pea green Chinese style PLA uniforms, the elderly, and the women and children families of soldiers down the mountain in frontline trenches battling government soldiers, walked the dusty single road through the guerrilla base or squatted smoking cigarettes and boiling rice over open fires around the village.

The rhythmic thud of incoming government artillery elicits no reaction from Khmer Rouge “Minister of Finance and Economy” Mak Ben, as he emerged from a bamboo hut, wearing rimless spectacles and a grey Mao suit buttoned at the collar around his neck. A blackboard on a thatched wall behind him shouted Khmer Rouge slogans in the Sanskrit based Cambodian script, proclaiming “Hate the Communist Vietnamese Aggressor!” and “believe deeply in Guerrilla Warfare!” He walked over to greet me, extending his hand and a smarmy, insincere smile. “Welcome to the liberated zones!”

I, of course, had been given no idea with whom I was going to meet, whether we would continue deeper into the jungle, or whether I would be offered useful new information. I patiently exchanged pleasantries while fresh mangoes, papaya, and rambuttan fruit was served.

Mak Ben wasted no time launching into the lecture he was instructed to give me, denouncing the “Vietnamese puppets and their despicable alliance” who were darkly plotting to “swallow” Cambodia and eliminate the Khmer Rouge.

He saved special vitriol for the Americans. Much of the not very thinly veiled threats were directed at ears many thousands of miles away to official Washington. “If you, the United States, continue to help the Vietnamese and Hun Sen fight us, we will use our right to self-defence. I must tell you that if you continue to aid the Vietnamese and their puppets, we cannot guarantee the safety of Americans in Cambodia,’ he smirked at me, betraying no friendliness. “One thing I should stress is we will never agree to surrender. Never!”

“We are very concerned, very interested in (U.S. national Security Advisor) Anthony lakes meeting with (Thai) Prime Minister Banharn Silp-archa,” he continued.

A French trained engineer and former Khmer Rouge diplomat, Mak Ben held the meaningless title of Minister of Economic and Finance in the Khmer Rouge so-called Provisional Government. “We want to know exactly what Lake means when he says the U.S. wants ‘democracy, stability, and security’ in Cambodia? Is it security through national reconciliation, without the Khmer Rouge?”

I was beginning to seethe at the realization of what was happening. I had been summoned from across the planet, on my own dime, to be lectured by a robotic mid-level Khmer Rouge minion because they, in their isolation-fueled paranoia, were reading dark plots into a routine stopover in Bangkok by a U.S. official. And they wanted me to deliver their pathetic message to my “bosses” in Washington.

Anthony Lake’s comments meant nothing. They were the routine rhetoric of long stated U.S. policy, made on a courtesy stopover in Thailand on his return from Beijing to Washington, which was so short he never left the Bangkok airport.

But Mak Ben hammered on, visions of dark plots having been conjured up in these isolated jungles, attaching ridiculous significance to lakes visit. That was why I had just flown across the world, drove to a remote Thai border town, holed up for days in a 1 star hotel hovel, and smuggled across international frontiers illegally: To meet this bonehead spout delusional rhetoric of a wholly out of touch with reality guerrilla band of murderous thugs caught in a time warp of their own making. They were convinced that Lake’s routine, passing comment was focused on destroying them, and they wanted me to relay to Washington that they would start assassinating American citizens working as humanitarian aid workers in Cambodia if the U.S. didn’t back off.

Mak Ben went on to describe a fanciful geo-political strategy of the U.S. having entered into an alliance with Vietnam—using Cambodia as a theatre—that aimed to undermine Chinese influence in the region. “After the cold war, Vietnam is too weak to carry out its expansionist strategy. But Vietnam will never abandon its strategy—which is deeply rooted among the old and young. Now 4 to 5 million Vietnamese nationals are in Cambodia. Laos is finished. Seventeen northeastern provinces in Thailand will encompass the Vietnamese Indochina Federation. The Vietnamese are breeding like rats. Vietnam is at our door. We cannot afford to be alone. We are with you! Who else if not the U.S., the West?”

He went on to contend that the Khmer Rouge enjoyed wide support in Asian capitals. “Diplomatically, ASEAN, China and Thailand are compelled to recognize the Phnom Penh regime…But morally we enjoy the support of the region,”

Mak Ben went on to downplay the influence of Pol Pot and the rest of the senior leadership, who had long officially retired but in fact remained in complete control. “Cambodia of the past belongs in the past. Let’s not talk about history. Pol Pot and all the Democratic Kampuchea leaders are very old. You can imagine how they are. They have lived 30 years in the forest without medical care.”

He continued to further piss me off. “I would like to tell you that Pol Pot and the other old political leaders are not in the political game anymore. They are finished….I am here to speak on behalf of my colleagues. I tell you that we, our new group, abide and continue to abide by liberal democracy, to be with the western world—the U.S.! I dare to tell you we are with the U.S., the free world! You can believe it or not. I have to stress to tell you that this is our political position and we will never change. For the sake of our country, we cannot go communist…to survive as a nation.”

I had known Mak Ben for many years and always been particularly unimpressed with him. He oozed insincerity. And he had the self conscious, arrogant swagger of a nervous, gangly teenager who you wanted to feel sorry for except he was mouthing such dangerous dribble. His eyes darted avoiding mine from behind his dark glasses. “You have abandoned your children!” he said wagging his finger at me, referring to the American government. “Look at Funcinpec, isn’t it your child? And Sam Rainsy, he is a child of the west. They are all your children. You have given birth to them. You have given them food, milk! You have sent them to school. Are you going to abandon your dying children?” he failed miserably at trying to look intimidating.

I remembered Mak Ben well from 1991 in Phnom Penh. He arrived with the delegation of Khieu Samphan in late November after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords on the Khmer Rouge first return to the capital since the fled the Vietnamese invasion in 19709, leaving behind more than a million corpses under the feet of the broken souls of those who survived.

They were not warmly welcomed back. Immediately upon arrival to their newly rented headquarters in downtown Phnom Penh, convoying in from the airport with armed United nations protection, the Khmer Rouge delegation were besieged by a government sanctioned mob that attacked them, invaded their villa, beat them up, looted the contents, and burned it to the ground.

I invaded the house with the mob. After Mak Ben and the others were trapped, beaten and terrified, he fled for his life through the crowd back to the jungle.

But while the mob was attacking Mak Ben and the other leaders, beating them bloody, I noticed nearby their unopened luggage and immediately began to loot it, rifling through looking for documents. A very happy fellow next to me opened a suitcase with $200,000 American dollars in it. Among many gems, I found Mak Ben’s Yugoslavian passport. And a letter from his daughter. She was a young girl, a refugee herself from the Khmer Rouge killing fields, who found her way from the UN refugee camps in Thailand to Australia as a very young child. She hadn’t seen her daddy in years. It was a heart wrenching letter that begged her father to address rumours that he was a Pol Potist. “They say you are a murderer, daddy, it said.

After fleeing the Phnom Penh mob back to the jungle, other Khmer Rouge made fun of Mak Ban, saying he was terrified of returning to Phnom Penh and being killed. He wanted to stay in the jungle, afraid to face the Cambodian people. Every time I saw him, I saw a bully and a coward.

After lecturing me on the U.S. abandoning their “children”, and threatening to murder American citizens unless Washington knuckled under to these nearly irrelevant delusional, self-important thugs sleeping in the forest, he smiled at me and tried to lighten things up. “America is a liberal democracy. We are nationalists. Democrats, too! So why don’t we join hands in national reconciliation. Join together! We are with you, the West!” he said growing increasingly animated, half breaking into song. “We are the World! Who is that singer? Johnny Jackson” Like he says, ‘We are the world!’ let’s join together!”

Mak Ben blithely ignored the fact that the U.S. government really could care less what happened in Cambodia, and it’s only stated policy towards the Khmer Rouge, in 1996, was funding projects to gather evidence to bring him and his comrades to an international court to face charges for crimes against humanity. Retreating from his absurd and comically ineffective attempt at hipness, he again tried to look menacing. “It is up to you. Our cards are on the table. We can fight for 100 years. We can eat grass if we have to. We have no other choice. We cannot accept that our nation, the great 2000-year-old nation of Angkor, disappears. As patriots, we will use our right to self-defence. It is better to die in the jungle.”

I was very angry by this time. It was clear to me that I had been summoned around the world to be lectured and to be a courier to deliver half empty threats to Washington. I was not to see anyone important and I was not to learn much useful. I asked, of course, to meet Pol Pot and others and to stay in the jungle and travel to guerrilla bases. “The leaders are all busy,” he said dismissively. He told me that I would have to leave that afternoon, before dark. “It is not safe here.” Down the mountain I could see smoke rising after the ground shook from each burst of mortars and artillery.

At lunch, a village elder looked morose. “We moved here last year to get away from government attacks,” he said. “For the people here it is a very hard.’ He eyed Mak Ben to make sure he wasn’t saying something wrong. “We used to have hope that the Paris Agreements would bring peace. We want national reconciliation. In our hearts we want national reconciliation and peace,” he said quietly. “Especially peace.”

The village elder, like I, was fed up. I left shortly afterwards, telling Mak Ben, in a moment of uncontrolled fury and indifference, to pass the message not to invite me back unless they were prepared to let me meet senior leaders. He was insulted. I didn’t care. While he betrayed nothing of the matter that July 30, 1996, as we spoke, the jungles just south of here were simmering with a similar attitude, and rebellion within their ranks was about to erupt into violent mutiny that would later that week deliver the biggest blow to Pol Pot and his loyalists since they were ousted from power by the Vietnamese invasion 17 years earlier.

(Copyright Nate Thayer. All Rights Reserved. Excerpts from unpublished manuscript “Sympathy for the Devil: A Journalist’s Memoir from Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.” No republication in whole or part without express written permission from the author.)

The Night Pol Pot Died: From the Jungles of Northern Cambodia

By Nate Thayer

(Copyright Nate Thayer. All rights reserved. No publication or transmission in whole or part allowed without express written permission of the author. Excerpts from the unpublished manuscript “Sympathy for the Devil: A Journalist’s Memoir from Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.”)

I was alone in a hotel the night Pol Pot died, in the small, remote Thai border town of Surin, abutting the Khmer Rouge controlled jungles of Cambodia.

I had been urgently summoned by the Khmer Rouge a few days earlier in a phone call which betrayed no specifics of why they wanted to see me, only that it was urgent. General Khem Nuon, the Khmer Rouge army-chief-of-staff and top field commander for Ta Mok had said only: “What you have been asking for we have agreed to.”

I took that to mean that I had been granted another interview with Pol Pot, but I was to learn it was even more significant. They had decided, as I had been pressing them for months, to turn Pol Pot over to the international community to face a trial.

I was summoned to discuss how to actually handle the logistics of handing over Pol Pot. It was an attempt to play their last card to garner international support and stem metastasizing mutinies and all out warfare raging in their jungles which threatened to finish their organization for the final time.

I had spent several days along the Thai-Cambodian rebel held border discussing their plight and interviewing their top cadre. Earlier that day I had filed a story with my magazine, the Far Eastern Economic Review, on the Khmer Rouge decision to hand over Pol Pot. The Review went to press at 6:00 pm Hong Kong time on Wednesdays—this one being that day--the 15th of April, 1998.

“We have decided to turn Pol Pot over to the Americans. But we can’t get in touch with the Americans. We discussed it again this morning and Ta Mok agreed. So we want to give him to you,” said the guerrilla commander.

I was, to put it mildly, momentarily flummoxed. What the fuck was I supposed to do with Pol Pot? Put him in the back of the pickup truck and take him to the Far Eastern Economic Review office in Bangkok? It was not part of my job description. I suggested they should promptly get in touch with the International Committee of the Red Cross and gave him the appropriate contact details. “That is a very good idea!” Khem Nuon responded. There were other details, but I knew that the decision to turn over one of the century’s most egregious perpetrators of crimes against humanity to face justice was a very good story indeed.

The magazine released the highlights of the story in a press release that night at 5:00 pm Bangkok time—6:00 pm Hong Kong time. It was picked up immediately by the international wire services and broadcast by the VOA at 8:00 pm Thailand time on their Khmer language service, which Pol Pot listened to every evening.

17 minutes after Pol Pot died—at 10:32 pm on 15 April 1998—my mobile phone rang in my hotel room. Reaching past the half-empty bottle of fake Johnny Walker Black whiskey on the bedside table, I grabbed the remote, muted the volume of CNN blaring on the television, and answered the phone.

“My friend, Pol Pot is dead,” said Gen. Khem Nuon, the KR commander and for months my good friend, in an urgent whisper. “He died a few minutes ago.” He was calling on a Chinese military radio phone from the jungles across the Thai border.

While the Khmer Rouge always whispered, they were rarely breathless. Nuon was desperate and looking for guidance. “What should I do?” he pleaded. “You must tell the Americans and you must come here immediately.” It was an example the murky terrain of my role as a journalist and liaison with the rebels in their final days.

As I listened to the Khmer Rouge army commander, Monica Lewinsky splashed across the muted screen of CNN International Headline news, the world news dominated with the criminal punishment and removal from power of the US president for his indiscrete blow job with a young intern, which would continue to tower over the story of the demise of a man who had been one of the century’s most notorious despots.

General Nuon called, mainly, because he knew I would want to know. He was both a killer and my friend. Nuon always tried his best to be helpful. I had spent countless days and nights over the last months with Nuon explaining how the world worked outside the jungles he had called home for thirty years. His appetite for and curiosity for ideas and the new-fangled world was insatiable. It equaled my thirst for knowledge of his movement, its inner workings and history. He had commanded the troops that overthrew Pol Pot the year before, and therefore risen as the top field commander of all Khmer Rouge troops. With his formidable language skills and new role as chief field commander of rebel troops, he was for the first time able to clandestinely leave the jungles he called home and travel for covert meetings in Thailand, where he was escorted by a special unit of Thai military intelligence operatives who closely monitored the routines, movements, and intentions of the outlawed guerrilla faction. Nuon was also receiving medical treatment in Bangkok at a Thai military facility for a cancerous thyroid. He would always come to my house and, over copious amounts of hot tea with lots of sugar, spend hours talking about life and just to be free from the harsh deprivations of the jungle. He had come to rely on me and me on him as we spent countless days and nights sharing thoughts and information. “We will be friends forever!” he would often say to me with a broad, gentle grin, squeezing my hand and hugging me. He was bright, gentle, hard working, kind, and a natural leader of men. He was also the top armed commander of one of the world’s most brutal political movements. He personified the contradictions within the Khmer Rouge movement that allowed them to be such a formidable political force despite their atrocious human rights record. He represented to me the contradictions in my own mind that I had developed for the Khmer Rouge—on one hand respectable and impressive and on the other hand unspeakably brutal and offensive. I was very fond of Nuon and him of me, despite the fact, in truth, I had grown to collectively detest everything that Cambodia had become.

There was symbiosis in my relationship with the Khmer Rouge: They needed me and I needed them and neither of us trusted each other. While competent jungle fighters, these were peasants, mostly rice farmers turned guerrillas, but their ranks were also filled with the best and the brightest of Cambodia who had fled to the jungles as youth 30 years before to join the revolution. Nuon and most others had no exposure to how the world worked outside the jungle, where most had lived there entire adult lives. They had come to largely rely on me to both interpret it for them and take their message to the outside.

After Nuon called with the news of Pol Pot’s death, I knew I wouldn’t have to tell the Americans that Pol Pot was dead. Moments after I hung up, an American intelligence officer charged with following Khmer Rouge developments called from Bangkok. He wanted to know if I had heard “rumours" that Pol Pot was dead. Nuon’s phone was tapped as I assumed mine was and the American spy wasn’t fooling either of us. It was a game whose rules I had long before learned and understood. But he also knew that a monitored phone conversation between a guerrilla commander and a journalist was insufficient to confirm such an historic event. They, as I, needed proof. To be sure this wasn’t some kind of political trick, someone independent and credible needed to go back to the jungle and provide details and evidence of what had happened. The American wanted me to bring Pol Pot’s body back if possible, he said, or some forensic material. “If you can’t do that, maybe you could cut off one of his fingers,” he suggested seriously, in an only fleetingly embarrassed tone. I told him I would do what I could. He needed to get Washington hard evidence of what had happened in these jungles inaccessible to them, and his crude suggestion didn’t faze me at the time at all. He was a top notch military intelligence officer, very bright, spoke fluent Thai, and had excellent relations with the Thai military.

The Americans had political restraints and could not simply show up at Khmer Rouge field headquarters, but I didn’t. I requested he make a phone call to the Thai military to encourage them to let me cross their borders at dawn with direct permission from the highest command, into the Khmer Rouge zones. The American promised to put in an urgent good word to facilitate my crossing through the heavily guarded Thai military checkpoints, through which all unauthorized persons were forbidden to pass. The road to Anlong Veng was a well hidden dirt path set off a remote road that hugged the unpopulated, jungle-clad Thai Cambodian border marked by a steep mountain escarpment. These rutted narrow paths were bordered by a towering jungle canopy and weaved through eerily silent thick tropical forests void of any human presence. It was a no-man’s land for miles after the last Thai checkpoint and before populated areas of the Khmer Rouge controlled jungle bases in Cambodia. The areas between frontlines are always the most dangerous, fraught with vulnerability from roving bandits, landmines, and ambush from a wide potential cast of characters.

While the Khmer Rouge wanted me to come, and Gen. Nuon controlled the troops at his jungle checkpoints, crossing out of Thailand into Khmer Rouge territory required another set of permissions.

A few moments after I hung up with the American spook, the assistant of the Thai army commander-in-chief called. It was close to midnight now. He said I was granted permission personally from the Thai army commander-in-chief, who I had known personally for years since he was a mid level Special Forces commander, to go out of Thailand to find Pol Pot’s body. The general was highly respected for his professionalism and honesty and previously was in charge of Thailand’s important and complicated efforts during the Cambodian covert war. He then headed army intelligence before rising to overall army commander, one of Thailand’s most powerful positions. His aide gave me the name and mobile phone number of the commander of a highly secret Thai military unit who I knew only by reputation. Regiment 16 was based in a remote location along the border and charged with the extremely sensitive task of controlling all access to and liaison with the Khmer Rouge, escorting them on their forbidden trips to Thailand and entering the Khmer Rouge zones with relative free will. Regiment 16 officially didn’t exist and performed functions Thailand officially denied it didn’t engage in. He said the Colonel was already instructed to meet me at a specific gas station at dawn

Neither the Thais or the Americans wanted to be seen as involved in what surely would be an extremely high profile event that would soon, I knew, dominate world headlines and attract scores of journalists to the border area. The Thais had long denied they had direct dealings with the Khmer Rouge, loathed the periodic public fallout from revelations to the contrary, and were under intense international scrutiny and United Nations official directive to not assist them.

My trip across the border from Surin in Thailand to Khmer Rouge zones was not a new scenario. I had made these forays many times before. And both the Thai and American intelligence officers trusted me. I could have burned them all many times over the years, and I never did.

I never revealed how I accessed the guerrilla zones or who assisted me. I knew which secrets to keep and which ones to spill and they appreciated that. One thing I rarely reported was what means and methods of getting to the story I sought or used which might jeopardize a source. The process was usually full of intrigue and would make a good read, but all officials involved operated covertly and therefore were deeply suspicious of journalists. I never betrayed a promise or source from any faction, agency or government.

By the time of Pol Pot’s death in 1998, no governments, even China, who previously appeared unconcerned with international opinion, could be seen as having friendly—or any—relations with the Khmer Rouge.

But everyone knew I still maintained good contacts with the guerrillas, and as a journalist this was wholly legitimate. Beholden to no one, I could hold the mantle of an independent, neutral journalist around my neck, which I defended proudly and without compromise. I had no political problems with associating with international pariahs and murderers. It started as my job. And I rather enjoyed it. Rogue people and states fascinated me. And then it became my obsession.

But the night of Pol Pot’s death, in many ways, marked when that particular episode of my life’s long efforts were finally over. It was midnight now. Pol Pot was dead. I felt numb mainly, but also relieved. I drank straight whiskey from a glass, re-organized my gear to cross the border in a few hours at dawn. I watched Monica Lewinsky play over and over on CNN, flashbulbs sparking, as she fled into a courthouse, to face the full puissance of the American justice system. It did not elude me that it was a twisted reality that the Lewinsky affairs sordid details of superfluous justice was far more newsworthy than that which had been deemed appropriate for pursuit of Pol Pot, who stood accused of crimes against humanity. It was a fact that when he died, 20 years after his regime, which left 1.7 million people dead--1/4 of the population—in 3 years, 8 months, and 20 days in power, Pol Pot had never been charged by any court with any crime anywhere in the world. When he died he was not formally, in the eyes of international law, a wanted man. In fact, it would have been a violation of his rights, sufficient to have any charges dismissed under international law, if he was captured and held against his will anywhere outside of Cambodia.

I knew that soon Pol Pot would be featured, perhaps not eclipsing but along with Monica, in the world press. It would leak to be a world story within hours. Once leaked, scores of journalists would descend on this Thai border town. I wanted to get in and out of the jungle before the circus began…..

To be continued….

(Copyright Nate Thayer. All rights reserved. No publication or transmission in whole or part allowed without express written permission of the author. Excerpts from the unpublished manuscript “Sympathy for the Devil: A Journalist’s Memoir From Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.”)

November 26, 2011

What Happened to the Khmer Rouge? They are Back in Power.

Some thoughts on the trial of Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, and Khieu Samphan

(Select excerpts from the unpublished manuscript “Sympathy for the Devil: A Journalist’s memoir from Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge” By Nate Thayer. Copyright Nate Thayer. All Rights reserved. No publication in whole or part without express written permission from the author)

By Nate Thayer

The 1996 “defections” or “surrender” of Ieng Sary and thousands of Khmer Rouge troops in Pailin was actually, more accurately, the beginning of the final reintegration of the Khmer Rouge back into the open legitimacy of mainstream Cambodian society. It also sent shockwaves through Pol Pot’s remaining Khmer Rouge loyalists in the north, and rocked the fragile coalition government in Phnom Penh. The “surrender” of thousands of armed Khmer Rouge did not, as one might expect, strengthen the stability of the central government. Rather, it capsized the precarious political balance of Cambodia itself. It forced to the surface the latent, grave tensions between Hun Sen’s CPP and Ranariddh’s Funcinpec party percolating under the veneer of their government partnership. And marked the irreversible escalation of an inevitable process of the collapse of the government itself.

While Cambodia’s mainstream political factions competed in their anti-Khmer Rouge rhetoric, the truth was far more complicated. For both Funcinpec and the CPP their immediate priority was not the destruction of the Khmer Rouge, but the destruction of each other. In order to achieve this, they each entered into a frenzied competition to embrace the Khmer Rouge as military allies. Each now began a mad rush to woo intact the armed strength of the Khmer Rouge and secure their loyalty to—not the government—but their separate political parties. And the reason for this was nothing less than a strategic plan by each political party to procure an alliance with a strong—not weakened—Khmer Rouge. Whichever party successfully romanced the Ieng Sary faction in Pailin and the Pol Potists in the north would use their new found strength to launch a coup d’état against their government partners. So the push to force the “surrender” of the Ieng Sary faction of the Khmer Rouge in late 1996 was not a harbinger of peace at all: It was, in fact, an irreversible and calculated preparation for war.

It is a mistaken and simplistic premise to assume that any of Cambodia’s mainstream political factions were “anti-Khmer Rouge.” They indeed were frightened, almost obsessed, that the Khmer Rouge would declare allegiance to their political opposition. Everyone recognized that in the perverted priorities of the organization of Cambodian political power, the Khmer Rouge was an impressive and useful military and political organization. The government rhetoric against the Khmer Rouge was as cynical and insincere as it was strident. It was designed primarily for the gullible ears of their foreign benefactors on whose largesse they depended to pay the bills to run the country. In late 1996, each government party, while boasting to the United States and others that they were the architects of the demise of the Khmer Rouge, simultaneously intensified secret negotiations with both the Ieng Sary Pailin-based Khmer Rouge and with Pol Pot’s forced holed up in the north to secure their fidelity.

And from his jungle redoubt, Pol Pot was playing the same game. Like a mistress toying with two jealous suitors, Pol Pot schemed how to best manipulate the government factions to secure his maximum foothold in power. The strategy of all factions were the same—seek maximum power with short term tactical allies to destroy whomever they deemed to be the most immediate threat. These new tactical alliances with other enemies, the thinking went, could then be, when appropriately vulnerable, later targeted and dispatched with similar tactics.

No Cambodian leader had a strategic vision that analyzed the consequences of such an approach. Peace, political stability, economic development, strengthening institutions of government and society, or coherent foreign and domestic policies were too far-sighted theories. And make no mistake: indeed theories they were. It had been centuries since Cambodia had enjoyed any such organization of internal power.

Coalition politics has never been an end game for any Cambodian seeking political power. Power sharing is a distasteful, insincere, and temporary step, part of endless military and political maneuvering serving the only shared strategy: to hold sole and absolute power. Absolute power is demanded not just by a political party, but invariably by leaders within each party. That is why Cambodia’s political parties are always dividing like amoebas. Ambitious leaders, like their God-King predecessors, pursue nothing less than personal and complete hegemony over the country. Until that is achieved, all competition or disagreement, or even policy differences, must be, when the time is appropriate, crushed. This truth is fundamental to understanding why Cambodia is on a seemingly endless roller coaster of internal upheaval. The concept of loyal opposition or coalition politics has no successful precedent in Cambodian history. The primary ramification of this paradigmatic tool of ascension to political power is that Cambodia has remained in a constant state of warfare for generations. The norm of civil war ebbs occasionally to an uneasy temporary political alliance or subjugation between squabbling and scheming enemies, often imposed with force by impatient and frustrated foreign powers. These were the circumstances in late 1996 and 1997 that preceded the reintegration of the Khmer Rouge back into national society and the violent collapse of the UN elected government.

The Cambodian government’s efforts to romance the Khmer Rouge, intensifying in late 1996, would be central to the series of crisis that would rock the country in coming months. It would ultimately culminate with a bloody power struggle among the top Khmer Rouge leadership in June 1997 which ousted Pol Pot from power and days later a bloody power struggle within the Phnom Penh government which ousted Ranarriddh and his Funcinpec from power. The two events were, of course, parcel to each other.

This turmoil collapsed the government and plunged Cambodia back into civil war in July 1997, Hun Sen quickly seizing sole control. Once again, as had happened so many times in Cambodian history, after Cambodians were left to control their own destiny alone—this time with the 1993 withdrawal of United Nations peacekeeping forces—the country quickly spiraled downward to its sure fate, eventually imploding in an orgy of chaos and violence until one man was left standing. This time Hun Sen—as Pol Pot, Lon Nol, and Sihanouk before him—lorded over his ‘victory”: a political landscape littered with fresh corpses and the surviving opposition humiliated and beaten into submission. In his defense, Hun Sen had simply won the game fair and square by the rules his opponents were all willing participants. But of course it was not a victory, because such an organization of power is, in the end, untenable.

Perhaps most importantly, however, the events of 1997 showed once again, that despite Pol Pot being ousted from the seat of government in 1979 after a short but shocking tenure in power, twenty years later he continued to dictate political developments in contemporary Cambodia. This fact is surely not a reflection of the attributes of the Khmer Rouge, but rather of the extraordinary weaknesses of their opposition: Even after committing crimes against humanity as a central government policy and unspeakable suffering on a horrific scale, the political options to the Khmer Rouge were so unimpressive that Pol Pot’s political movement remained a viable alternative with sufficient popular sympathy to still be a force to be reckoned with decades later. The tenacity of the Khmer Rouge is nothing other than a wholesale indictment of the failures of the entire Cambodian political culture. In a properly organized country, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge would have utterly collapsed under the weight of its own record. The reasons that it didn’t are an essential prism necessary to view and understand the sad and distasteful realities of the Cambodia that preceded and succeeded the Khmer Rouge.

(Select excerpts from the unpublished manuscript “Sympathy for the Devil: A Journalist’s memoir from Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge” By Nate Thayer. Copyright Nate Thayer. All Rights reserved. No publication in whole or part without express written permission from the author)

For those following the Khmer Rouge trial of Nuon Chea: Background ambience behind the scenes of the final collapse of the Khmer Rouge. Selected Excerpts from “Sympathy for the Devil: A Journalists Memoir from Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge” By Nate Thayer

(Copyright Nate Thayer. Excerpts from unpublished manuscript “Sympathy for the Devil: A Journalists Memoir from Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge” All Rights Reserved. No publication or citation permitted without author’s express written permission.)

By 1994, the Khmer Rouge leadership once again evaporated into the jungle. To my frustration, my methodically constructed stable of Khmer Rouge sources was now deep in hiding. They continued to communicate with me through an elaborate network of underground agents and Communist party cells. But it was a tortuous web, elaborately compartmentalized to obscure the identity and isolate the location of the guerrillas from their enemies. It would often take weeks, even months for a message from the jungle to get to me in Phnom Penh. Sometimes they would contact me through intermediaries by phone or deceptively postmarked mail. Other times notes would be hand-delivered by well dressed strangers who arrived at my house unannounced, politely exchanged pleasantries, decline to introduce themselves, and hand me a sealed envelope. They would then slip back out into the bustling city through the mazes of armed checkpoints, unpaid government soldiers to busy sleeping or extorting money to look for Khmer Rouge agents.

And I was always organizing my periodic trips across Cambodian government frontlines or over the Thai frontier to the guerrilla bases themselves. Even though it was a war-zone, I felt most relaxed deep in the jungles. I felt much safer under the protection of the disciplined Khmer Rouge than the unpredictable anarchy in government towns. In Phnom Penh, I slept with loaded automatic weapons by my bed and rarely left my house without a pistol and extra ammunition clips. With the guerrillas, I always slept peacefully in my hammock, tied to two trees, a symphony of whooping monkeys and insect’s overhead, surrounded by armed bodyguards who were charged with ensuring no one harmed me.

Messages from my Khmer Rouge contacts were always short and vague, the circumspect handwritten scrawls on ripped out notepaper almost palpable with intrigue and fear. “My Dear Friend, I got your message. If you can get here, we have already agreed to meet you. Ask our Thai friend who gives you this to help. You can trust him We have many difficulties and there are many things I need to talk urgently about,” read one typical unsigned note in its entirety. Even their written messages seemed to rise off the page in a clandestine whisper.

There was urgency to their missives but they always left me unfulfilled, desperate to know more. Their culture of secrecy permeated their every breathing action, their every move the instinctual second nature of a hunted animal. If you read the above message, you will notice, on second reading, there is no clue on why they wanted to meet, where the meeting was, when it would be, who it was with, or what it was about. The notes themselves, when they risked committing to paper, would not even betray whom it was from or that it was intended for me. There was a feeling off stark vulnerability whenever engaging with the Khmer Rouge under such conditions. I never knew where I was going or when I would be back. I always went anyway. All Khmer Rouge communication was like this. It is a fundamental lesson in all clandestine services: reveal nothing that isn’t absolutely necessary to accomplish your mission—and after decades in the jungles the Khmer Rouge had hones it to an art. This succeeded in leaving them firmly in control of all encounters and maximally impenetrable to their enemies.

And make no mistake. They had no doubt I was an enemy agent. Given their historically intolerant view of the likes of me, I was always keenly alert around them. If it was expedient or useful, I never had any doubt my closest Khmer Rouge sources would kill me without emotion. And they often changed their minds of whether one was a friend or foe. Most of those killed by the Khmer Rouge were loyal cadre who had been deemed, almost always out of unfounded paranoia, ‘exposed’ as an enemy agent. For Khmer Rouge cadre, it was, in fact, more dangerous to be a Khmer Rouge loyalist than their enemy. But such political thinking was fundamental to Cambodian political culture and all political leaders and parties operated under such a psychological foundation for pursuing and maintaining power. No one trusted anyone else, including one’s closest comrades. Betrayal and purges had been fundamental to Cambodian politics throughout modern history.

It is rare to meet any Cambodian who has a problem with murdering civilians as a concept. The parameters of the moral debate are simply confined to the merits of the victims. But importantly, in 1992, I had been formally deemed a potentially useful enemy by Pol Pot himself, I was told by a Khmer Rouge cadre close to the top leader. Pol Pot had ordered that a channel be kept open to me. He had deemed me useful to getting their message out in as empirical and neutral manner as they could hope for. His reasoning was that my writings were read by those world figures who were involved in forming Cambodian policy. I was guardedly comfortable with that. In Cambodia, that is the best a foreigner can hope for: A strategic enemy but tactical ally.

In 1993, some of the top cadre with whom I had become close sought permission to communicate with me without prior notification of and approval from the party. When Pol Pot agreed, this was a crucial development in improving my access. All cadre knew it was unwise to question the wisdom of Pol Pot, and followed his orders unquestionably. Pol Pot’s absolute control of all aspects of the organization’s activities presupposed that a Khmer Rouge cadre simply did not have encounters with an American, little less establish a personal relationship, without the clear approval of Pol Pot himself. The penalty for such recklessness was death.

Pol Pot’s sanction of limited access for me was the function of the quality, influence, and reputation of the primary publications I worked for. The far Eastern Economic Review, my primary employer, was the finest newsweekly on Asia—and required reading around the globe for the limited number of diplomats, officials, academics, businessmen, and journalists interested in the region. It was authoritative and serious and scrupulous and courageous in the quality and accuracy of its in-depth, often exclusive reporting. It covered even the most obscure reaches of Asia comprehensively with depth and persistence and insight. Countries like Cambodia have few readers and advertisers and this was a key reason why most media devoted few full time resources to its coverage. When something happened in Cambodia—or elsewhere in remote corners of Asia—the Review had already provided the context and preludes that preceded the breaking news. It was also in a unique position to have in place people who had the sources and knowledge to provide superior coverage. It was a reporters magazine, driven by an eclectic group of correspondents who often had years of history in the areas they covered. The reporting was backed up by superb editing which ensured its content was fair, comprehensive, and accurate.

The Phnom Penh Post—the first independent newspaper in Indochina since 1975—was a courageous, scrappy, and detailed bi-weekly newspaper that was read by everyone in Cambodia who was involved in any aspect of policy. It published the details and gave the space that only a local paper can provide. It was started in 1992 by my good friend Michael Hayes, an American who had no newspaper or business experience who had left his work as a humanitarian aid official with the Asia Society, and started the paper with his own life savings from scratch. I lived at the Phnom Penh Post during my years in Cambodia in a three story villa which housed the newspaper offices, production facilities, and the living quarters of Michael, his wife Kathleen, and myself. It was a center of constant hubbub, with a steady 24-hour stream of incoming journalists, varied visitors, sources, and newspaper employees producing the paper.

I also wrote for Jane’s Defence Weekly, the preeminent authority on military matters, and the Washington Post, which was required reading by everyone in Washington. Between them, the Khmer Rouge expected that, in their attempt to spread their message, an honest, accurate analysis that would have a far reaching impact would emerge. They were not often happy with my missives, but also knew that very little could be written which would further blacken their reputation. “ We believe you are serious,” they said to me more than once. They were used to being the target of often inaccurate, speculative, and invariably hostile reporting that focused only on their years in power. In contrast, we covered current issues regarding them as well. I always provided background context that included their atrocious history and current dictatorship, but they were used to this after years of unrelenting criticism. They knew full well that they were culpable, and respected my criticism of their organization as long as it was accurate and comprehensive, regardless of the requisite negative content.

Aside from my forays into the jungle, I was used to meeting more cosmopolitan Khmer Rouge political leaders and diplomats in five-star hotel lobbies and at diplomatic functions. But after 1994, two years after he withdrew the Khmer Rouge from participating in the UN election process, Pol Pot ordered them all back to the jungle. I wasn’t even sure where along the 800-kilometer swath of mountainous jungles over the Thai border my Khmer Rouge sources were hiding. Innumerable times, I travelled for days to remote villages near the Thai frontier on instruction from the Khmer Rouge to meetings. As often as not, a liaison would never materialize. Or I would be guided to an obscure guerrilla base where some mid-level cadre would spout useless propaganda already broadcast verbatim over their clandestine radio. Hungry for gossip, news, or rumour, I relentlessly pursued any source that might offer information. I flew to cities in Asia, North America, and Europe trying to glean information from shadowy sympathizers, relatives of cadre, and former guerrillas who had left the movement, and other underground operatives. I met with spies and diplomats from numerous countries charged with tracking the guerrillas. And I was constantly in contact with Cambodians of all political affiliations, whose agenda I covered equally, and who often knew of activities within the Khmer Rouge through their fellow Cambodians. Each of these encounters, sometimes involving weeks of work, would perhaps produce only a quote or single detail or a rumour to pursue or confirm. I would sort these tidbits of knowledge and carefully piece them together, constructing a portrait of what was happening in the jungle and publish it as an article. It was a frustrating, tedious, and usually fruitless business reporting on the Khmer Rouge: that is why there was effectively on one else who bothered to try. But I enjoyed the methodical challenge and it fit my personality to work alone and focus to fruition on a single task.

But for most of the world, by 1995 the Khmer Rouge leadership had simply slipped silently into the impenetrable forests of northwest Cambodia, contact severed completely, and guerrilla war resumed. Like a disturbed hornet’s nest, they dispatched small, angry squads of troops to attack around the country, emerging from the jungle to strike vulnerable government outposts, massacre ethnic Vietnamese civilians, and blow up trains and bridges. They then immediately evaporated back into the forest.

“The resistance forces are everywhere. We can attack the two-headed, one-eyed puppets and their American bosses everywhere!,” a secret 1995 internal directive by the Khmer Rouge leadership to military commanders said, referring to the fragile UN elected coalition government of co-prime ministers, and to the war wound that left Hun Sen blinded in one eye when he was a loyal lieutenant of Pol Pot. “We can cut the highway anywhere, any bridge and culvert. We are going to cut it over and over until the two headed government…and the Americans turn their tail and run.” The directive instructed: “ Cut the enemies throat! Cut the enemies throat! Cut the enemies blood arteries! Tragic fit, tragic death to all the enemies near and far!”

Nothing was subtle with the Khmer Rouge. This is how they talked in conversation, sputtering vitriol and contempt for the rest of the country who they had dehumanized simply because they weren’t loyal to them.

Westerners who stumbled into Khmer Rouge units after 1993 were regularly kidnapped and brutally executed. They included, as well as many Asian nationalities, Australians, Americans, Belgium’s, French, German, and British citizens. I was involved in every case. They all died an appalling death. I was to learn eventually that their executioners included some of my closest Khmer Rouge friends. Each and every one of their families contacted me, my telephone number given to them by their governments who were unable to assist them. They had been told I might have influence or leverage with the guerrillas and they were desperate for help in saving their husbands, sons, and daughters.

These remain some of my most painful experiences. I was not able to save any of them. I did, often after months of work, gather the grisly details of the demise of each. I remain haunted by the stricken, inconsolable anguish on the faces of their loved ones. They invariably wanted to know every last bit of gruesome information. It is equally true for the millions of Cambodians who were, in some ways, unlucky enough to survive the Khmer Rouge brutal years in power.

But, by 1995, behind the veneer of confidence and aggressiveness, there was a cancer metastasizing at the heart of the Khmer Rouge movement. I knew from the private whispers of grunt Khmer Rouge soldiers on the frontlines and forests, Pol Pot’s 1992 decision to pull out of the Paris Peace Agreements, forego the internationally recognized 1993 UN elections, and break the cease-fire, was considered by many Khmer Rouge cadres as a disastrous, perhaps fatal mistake.

Thousands of rank-and-file felt this way but seethed in silence. Expressing disagreement on such matters was suicide. But the reality was self-evident. Pol Pot and his small group of core leadership were very much like the emperor with no clothes. Instead of bringing them closer to power or peace, the Khmer Rouge were now utterly isolated, opposed by the mass of the peasantry, covert foreign military and material aid severed by China and Thailand, and at war once again. Morale was abysmal.

After two decades of war and unspeakable suffering, the hopes and opportunity for peace that came with the 1991 signing of the Paris Peace Accords had been squandered. Many Khmer Rouge cadre believed that their leaders had failed them and were deeply disappointed. Others were bitter and angry. But expressing opinion or dissent within the Khmer Rouge was unthinkable. And to add to the simmering frustration of the Khmer Rouge, in the eyes of their enemies they were increasingly not viewed as a serious threat. For an organization that took pride—in the manner of a neighborhood gang of bullies—in forcing others to accommodate their demands through intimidation and sheer terror to be largely ignored by their enemies, was deeply demeaning. And a humiliated Khmer Rouge had the potential to strike back irrationally to demand attention. They were dangerous enough when they were rational.

After the 1993 UN elections, the Khmer Rouge’s biggest threat, in fact, came from within their own ranks. Swatting malarial mosquitoes and eating plain rice seasoned only with salt and sprinkled with dried fish boiled on an open jungle campfire, sleeping in their hammocks slung between trees in the forest, rank and file cadre listened with growing resentment to short-wave radio broadcasts of the international embracement of the government that emerged from the 1993 UN elections. Foreign companies, diplomatic recognition and international aid flooded to their enemies, bolstering their legitimacy and threatening the Khmer Rouge with becoming sidelined as a superfluous political force. The Khmer Rouge, in contrast, remained without electricity, running water, health care, schools, and, increasingly, hope that they would ever taste the fruits of peace, little less victory.

Never willing to address unpleasant realities, the Khmer Rouge went to absurd lengths to put a positive spin on their increasingly desperate conditions. “Our army, our guerrilla forces , are more and more respectable regarding their view, their political knowledge, their economical situation, their welfare, their attitude toward the peaceful relation scheme, their stance on spying activity, and their awareness of the undermining activity,” wrote the top Khmer Rouge leadership to senior commanders in a secret policy and military strategy directive in November 1995. “Thanks to these qualities, the number of our cadre are multiplying; the number of our forces increases; and our forces are more disciplined, more decisive, braver and more resolute to fighting the two-headed national traitors, slaves of the Vietnamese communists and their alliance. The slaves of the Vietnamese communists and their alliance are being swollen, decomposed, and rotten, all devoured by maggots, and having no more flesh.”

The Khmer Rouge, like all Cambodian political factions, seethed in hatred and utterly intractable absolutes. This is the bane of Cambodian political culture—not just the Khmer Rouge—and central to understanding the unending instability in Cambodia. There is no concept of compromise or common good, little less common ground. If you disagreed with the Khmer Rouge, you were a “slave” of the “national traitors.” One did not seek to just defeat the enemy, but preferred to see their bodies not just dead but “rotting” and “devoured by maggots.” You didn’t just execute someone who opposed you, you tortured and humiliated them first, and then murdered their wives and children.

Not only were the Khmer Rouge short of friends and money, but weapons and ammunition. The cessation of foreign and military aid was addressed by boastful self-delusions that they were self sufficient. In 1995, they ordered all soldiers and civilians to meet a quota of carving homemade bamboo stakes and other crude weapons. “The strategic weapons that we now call our ‘main forces’, sharp pointed soldiers, very sharp are punji sticks, and booby traps. These are the strategic weapons we experimented with and the results are highly effective. These forces are located all over, and bamboo, woods, poisons, resins, machetes, axes, and knives are all locally abundant. It can be said that factories making strategic weapons to fight the enemies exist locally and are abundant all over, in lakes and rivers.”

This was the Khmer Rouge leadership’s response to the cutoff of covert military aid from China and the 1994 UN imposed sealing of the border with trade from Thailand. To Khmer Rouge soldiers who had to face the reality of a well-armed enemy in battle, this was not only profoundly insulting, it was life threatening. Their leaders were now asserting that bamboo stakes constituted superior firepower. As a result of such preposterousness, Khmer Rouge cadre increasingly directed their resentment not so much at their enemy as at their own leaders.

Many Khmer Rouge felt their future was passing them by. Defections of frontline troops increased. Morale was abysmal. Soldiers pulled back in battle rather than risk death in a war they now had only a veneer of allegiance to. The blind loyalty of armed cadre long demanded by their faceless leadership, and enforced by fear, was on the brink of dangerously unraveling. And the Khmer Rouge leadership reacted by cracking down on their own loyalists.

Ta Mok, the Khmer Rouge top military field commander and Army chief-of-staff, not so affectionately known as “The Butcher”, lamented that “pacifism has entered our cadres” and that “there is confusion, a blending of our essence and our enemies,” referring to increasing contact with villagers in government run frontline areas and growing sympathies among his troops to end the war. The Khmer Rouge top leadership ordered all contacts severed with villages not strictly under their control. “We have continued to exist with them, eat with them, peacefully allied with them to the point that some of our own cadres and ranks have repeatedly been put in danger. In some of our units, enemy elements comprise 50-60%.” To be deemed an “enemy element” was a spine chilling accusation.

Their leaders made clear to their subordinates, in a secret internal document distributed to frontline units at the time, that they were being closely watched. “Our first responsibility is we must be clean. Our major responsibility is to clean up our act,” warning not to sympathize with proposed negotiations to end the war which they referred to as “the peaceful relationship scheme.” "Our ranks , our cadre, must be clean, our skin clear, free of smell, no peaceful relationship scheme, no spying activity, no internal undermining, nothing to be compromised at all…”

When, that same year of 1995, the leadership ordered troops to attack and burn to the ground front-line villages in northern Siem Riep province they suspected of not being sufficiently sympathetic, more than 1000 Khmer Rouge troops defected instead of carrying out the order. When I visited, the scene was surreal. Hundreds of Khmer Rouge soldiers in pea green Chinese PLA style uniforms lounged in the markets, flirting with local village girls, their commanders firing artillery they had taken with them, now firing back at their former comrades just past the tree line that marked the border from the rice paddies to the guerrilla jungles they had inhabited for thirty some years until only days earlier. “When we went to fight, we didn’t see other nationalities,” said former Khmer Rouge battalion commander Tung Yun. “ we fought because we were ordered to do so, but in our hearts none of us wanted war anymore.” He spoke for thousands of others still in the jungles.

In an atmosphere that forbids questioning the policies of their leaders, with no outlet to vent their disappointment and debate the merits of returning to war, conditions were ripe for an internal Khmer Rouge explosion of violence.

To be honestly transparent, in retrospect, part of me viewed this growing international and domestic consensus for peace and stability as a fundamental career threat. But while I loved being a war correspondent, this war was now meaningless. The fact was, by 1994, I, too, was tired of this war. I, too, did not want to be the proverbial last person to die in a war which now clearly had no purpose other than each side trying to secure raw and maximum power. After the withdrawal of the Vietnamese occupying troops in 1991 and the United Nations forces in 1993, it was now a war without issues, stripped to the carcass of armed conflict which is simply mans raw excersize of his most primal, uncivilized instinct for power and vengeance through violence and superior force; simply a winner takes all bloody grab for power. And the rank and file on all sides knew it. The soldiers from all the political factions still at war were nothing more complicated than pawns for a few hundred powerful and rich so-called leaders who weren’t courageous enough to wage peace and just wanted all of the pie. Many rank and file on both sides refused to fight seriously when ordered to battle, firing from a safe distance and reluctant to engage in tactics which threatened their lives.

By 1995, I had only one more objective in Cambodia, and that was to meet and speak with and interview Pol Pot. And ask him two simple questions. "Why?" And "Are you sorry?" And then, I told myself, I would leave this wicked society forever.

I viewed brewing dissatisfaction within the Khmer Rouge as creating cracks in their armour, opening up potential new means of access for me. Where there was turmoil, there was increased opportunity I could wangle my way into the heart of the Khmer Rouge central command. I had found that the Khmer Rouge opened up to me when they had difficulties, which often left them with issues they wanted to clarify or explain to outsiders. Turmoil and weakness increased the possibility that they might have to play that card. And I was constantly scheming to see that the vehicle they used to do so would be me. I was always encouraging, maneuvering for, and poised to take advantage of such contacts. I approached it as an endless chess game requiring strategy and patience and an intimate knowledge of one’s opponent. I knew from viewing the chessboard that I was closing in, however slowly, on their King, Pol Pot. Obstacles were being removed and I was advancing.

For years my biggest fear was Pol Pot would die before I was able to meet him. I would wake at night, my stomach in knots, with the thoughts of years of effort being concomitantly extinguished with his last breath. Barring that, I was convinced that one day I would meet him face-to-face and Pol Pot would have to answer the questions that haunted his broken countrymen.

In 1996, through smuggled letters, meetings with their underground operatives, and visits to their guerrilla bases across the frontier Thai borders in the jungles of Cambodia’s north, I pushed harder for them to allow me access to their leadership, arguing plausibly that they clearly had to try something new. The Cambodian government and the international community were perplexed by the silence of the Khmer Rouge leadership and unclear what they wanted. They had let no one deep into their territory for four years--since my last visit—and they could see clearly they were in a weaker position since disengaging from the outside world.

They didn’t have to be convinced that they needed to do something, but they didn’t know what. They needed to reengage their movement to the Cambodian political process. What they needed rather than their tired, failed tactics of vitriolic rhetoric and terror was, I suggested, to shed light on their internal movement to lessen the blackened mystique that had shrouded their movement and Pol Pot in for forty years. Much of that mystique was not politically threatening to them, but simply allowing access to the personalities and daily life in their control zones. My perennially repeated request was that they allow an independent, credible witness as unfettered access as possible. A fresh look from inside their territory, talking with their loyalists, couldn’t possibly result in them having a diminished reputation in the eyes of the world, I repeated to their cadres. They were already a household name worldwide synonymous with unspeakable brutality and senseless violence. In the eyes of the world and most of their countrymen, they were already the devil incarnate and they knew it. There was certainly nothing I could write that would further blacken their image.

Many Khmer Rouge cadre sympathized and were, to a degree, in awe of the sometimes ridiculous and always relentless lengths I had gone over the years attempting to access their inner sanctums and interview Pol Pot.

My persistence, I think, struck some familiar chord of revolutionary self-sacrifice-against-daunting-odds. Perhaps many of them could relate, having disappeared as eager, patriotic youths into the jungle more than twenty years earlier, waiting for naught the revolutionary victory. If they weren’t impressed, at least they were entertained by this shaved-headed American who wouldn’t go away. And if they weren’t entertained, I had regardless become a kind of fixture, like some half-mad Dennis the Menace to the Khmer Rouge’s Mr. Wilson, with whom they grew resigned to affectionately tolerate.

They had, over time, tried everything to reject me—arrested me at gunpoint, shot at me, ordered me killed, banished me, robbed me, and handed me over the border in disgust to be arrested by Thai authorities. I became rather legendary within the Khmer Rouge army, I was to learn, as this reckless, perhaps insane, rather likeable American who would appear in the oddest of circumstances. Literally nothing dissuaded me. I was fully cognizant and reconciled to the fact that there was s strong chance I would die in these jungles. I always tried to be smart with tactics, having committed to a strategy that required accepting a high level of intrinsic danger. But I never once rejected going into a war-zone simply because it was dangerous.

I continued to show up, uninvited, over the years in virtually every corner of their jungles, often where no foreigner had ever been. I arrived by foot, captured Russian military vehicles, driven by defecting government soldiers during battle, on the back of an elephant, bicycle, dirt bikes supplied by the CIA to non-communist guerrilla allies, by river in commandeered sampans, ox-cart, rented helicopter, accompanied by United Nations troops, guided by my own hired mercenaries, escorted by Thai military intelligence liaisons, with Thai businessmen who traded with the guerrillas, logging trucks, and even by taxi cab ( I can remember more than once the driver of my hired car simply refusing to go any further into the scrub and abandoning me to walk the last few miles). I once traversed the trench lines into Khmer Rouge territory driving a government military officer’s Russian jeep, adorned with full government regalia identifying the vehicle, which I had rented from a corrupt Cambodian general. I remember startled guerrilla troops popping up from bunkers, leaves and branches crudely camouflaging their helmets, as I weaved through frontline trenches and around minefields in abandoned rice paddies. I was advised by unamused Khmer Rouge commanders never, ever to do that again.

Almost always, I arrived under dangerous circumstances, through combat frontlines, from enemy-held territory, over mountains, crossing national borders, always through a minefield, from north, south, east and west, essentially to be turned away, mainly empty-handed, time and time again. I didn’t mid the rejection. The chase itself was a fun-filled adventure, a young man’s fantasy.

My visits to the Khmer Rouge zones didn’t endear me to the government forces either, who regularly tried to kill me. Spies are ubiquitous in Cambodia. The government would know I was in Khmer rouge zones within a very short time, often within hours. I listened to government field radio reports broadcasting my location to front-line troops. They would then rocket our position. This, in turn, didn’t endear me to the guerrilla troops with whom I was visiting.

In general, I was viewed as a problem. Many had concluded my very presence was simply a pain in the ass. There was often a mood shift which seemed to elicit an inaudible groan when I would arrive.

But I was the only westerner many of the Khmer Rouge cadre and jungle fighters had ever had contact with. So there was the ever present animal in the zoo factor. It was not unusual for large crowds of Khmer Rouge civilians and soldiers, some walking for days, to gather at a safe distance and gawk at me for hours. Old ladies would squat and chew betel nut, spitting and exchange raucous commentary with each other. “ Are they all fat and bald?” one toothless old lady asked my bodyguard in a remote village which had never hosted a foreigner before.

I remember clearly one time squatting around a fire late at night deep in the jungle just north of the great temples of Angkor Wat, monkeys crying from the tall canopy of trees. I had walked for two weeks from Thailand with non-communist guerrillas accompanying them on a mission to attack government positions. We often encountered Khmer Rouge guerrillas who shared the jungle with their then coalition partners fighting the common enemy, the occupying Vietnamese army and their installed government in Phnom Penh. A grizzled Khmer Rouge cadre was casually drawing battle plans in the dirt with a stick, explaining to other young fighters the next morning’s attack. He pointed to a small village, thrusting his stick in the dirt and raw hatred flashing from his eyes, hissed “Tomorrow, we will turn it into a rice field!” Several minutes into the preview of the intended assault he looked across at me squatting on my haunches a few feet away from him, locked on my eyes in abrupt recognition, and lept back with a cry of terror. “Joy Marey! Barong moek Howee!” Translation: “Motherfucker! A white foreigner has arrived!” was the totality of his exact words. He literally grabbed an AK-47 assault rifle, jumped to his feet, clutched his heart and paced back and forth, taking deep breaths and cursing for a few minutes to recover. Everyone who fit my description, after all, was the enemy, of whom he had only seen pictures of over the years. And to see a vision of the devil himself, a blue-eyed, bearded, bald one, armed and dressed in combat fatigues staring at him from across the campfire deep in the jungle, was too much for him to process. The poor man never seemed quite to recover. He glared at me for days afterwards, his face furrowed in a queer mix of raw hate and confusion.

To try and keep track of the inner workings of the Khmer Rouge was not just a matter of analyzing information. That was the easier part—a skill developed by following the nuances of their historical methodology and rhetoric. The hard part was getting credible, first-hand information. Elevating secrecy to an art form, the Khmer Rouge obscured and compartmentalized all levels of information so it wouldn’t fall into the hands of the enemy, which by 1995 was a category that included every single nation on earth and most Cambodian citizens. I was keenly aware, each time I went into their territory, it was a category that clearly also included me.

For the time being, however, I continued to be a potentially useful enemy whose channel, by order of Pol Pot himself, remained open. I comforted myself by dwelling on the fact, particularly when I was being glared at by armed Khmer Rouge, that every Khmer Rouge cadre knew that it would be suicidal to harm someone who Pol Pot thought might be useful. My relationship with the Khmer Rouge had evolved in the early 1990’s to include, by default, nothing less than perhaps their primary liaison to the West. They did not think of me as a sympathizer. Indeed, in their perpetual state of rather astounding and logic-muddled paranoia, they had concluded that I was a paid operative of the Central Intelligence Agency. “We have discussed whether you are CIA and decided it doesn’t really matter,” one Khmer Rouge diplomat told me matter of factly once. They politely attempted to maintain the charade that they thought I was an independent journalist, but we both knew they didn’t believe it. They simply did not understand the concept of someone who did not serve the interests of—was under the control of—the government that issued ones passport. They often used the term “you” when referring to the US government or angrily condemned me for some Washington policy. I would ritually correct them. And they would apologize half-heartedly. The irony is US law forbids the CIA from recruiting journalists employed by American owned media, and the Far Eastern Economic Review was owned by Dow Jones—perhaps the most iconic symbol of world capitalism. So, while extensive, my dealings with CIA operatives were often a tortuous process themselves that rivaled the Khmer Rouge, with many having to go through acrobatic lawyer-driven hoops to receive prior permission from Washington before meeting me. Some simply ignored the directive from Langley, and I count many intelligence officials—from a broad range of competing countries—among my friends.

It was helpful that the Khmer Rouge faced a couple of basic problems that worked to my advantage. Even before they retreated back to the jungle in 1992, many governments banned their officials from any direct contact with the guerrillas or their representatives. Even at diplomatic functions and cocktail parties, the Khmer Rouge was shunned. US policy went so far as to specifically prohibit initiating contact at cocktail parties. U.S. government officials were allowed—by written directive—to return, but not offer, a verbal greetings or handshake. This tied the hands of intelligence agents or diplomats who were on one hand tasked with gathering information on the guerrilla group, and on the other forbidden from dealing with them directly. I, of course, had no such problem.

At cocktail parties, Khmer Rouge officials would often be standing alone, clearly uncomfortable in their western suits, looking grumpy as they held a cocktail they wouldn’t drink, being ignored and eyed simultaneously, not unlike a pedophile relative at a family gathering.

I not only had no problem chatting them up, I reveled in it. I particularly liked National Day celebrations, held by virtually every countries embassy once a year. By protocol, the entire diplomatic list and other dignitaries and select nationals of the country would be invited, including the Khmer Rouge. Those functions to which I wasn’t invited, I crashed. I have attended scores over the years. The hotel ballrooms and ambassador’s living rooms are filled with people who would normally refuse my telephone calls. It was a diplomat’s nightmare and journalists dream; stuck being chatted up by a journalist he had long tried to avoid. Often the Khmer Rouge diplomat would be found in the corner with the North Korean or some other third world pariah. Afterwards, it wasn’t unusual to be grilled by jealous but thankful diplomats who needed something to write in their cable to the home office on their rare Khmer Rouge encounter.

The second basic problem, after the Khmer Rouge retreated back to their jungle redoubts, was often simply a matter of logistics. Dialogue from the jungle is a pain in the neck. Aside from the issues of safety and political will, physical access was extremely difficult. Normal modes of contact—such as telephone, email, meetings in obscure seedy bars or fancy hotel lobbies were, of course, not possible or practical.

In 1996, I took a sabbatical from reporting from Phnom Penh to be a visiting scholar at a Washington academic think tank. It was not unrelated to a rather incendiary series of articles I had written naming both Cambodian Prime Ministers as being bankrolled by and, in exchange, giving political protection to, a major Asian heroin trafficker and organized crime figure.

One day in 1996, while in my office at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, I got a call from a friend in Europe with a message. The Khmer Rouge wanted to see me urgently. Could I come to the jungle? The message was to go to the remote sleepy Thai border town of Surin, and check into a particular hotel as soon as possible. When I arrived at the hotel, I was to call a particular phone number in Europe and give my hotel room number. I was then to wait for someone to contact me. That was the entirety of the message. It was a typical set-up for a meeting with the Khmer Rouge. No mention of who I was to meet, where I would go, when I would be contacted, or what the subject matter would concern. I didn’t even know who within the Khmer Rouge was contacting me.

The routing of the message was typical in its circuitous layers to obscure any prying eyes or ears. And it was designed for the Khmer Rouge to remain in complete control of the process of me arriving in their territory. It denied me any ability to double-cross them if I was so inclined, or to pass on sensitive information to any foreign intelligence officials. It also left me very vulnerable if something were to go wrong. There was always a palpable undercurrent of dark unease for me with these people.

A Khmer Rouge “former” diplomat in Paris, who was married to a French woman and therefore held French citizenship and was allowed to remain in France, served as one of the guerrillas primary contacts in Europe. The Khmer Rouge “former” diplomat in Paris had been contacted by another Khmer Rouge “former” diplomat living underground in Bangkok (in a safe house maintained by Thai military intelligence). That diplomat maintained human runners who would be dispatched back and forth overland across the Thai border into the jungle. The diplomat in Paris had called my friend. My friend, a Franco-Khmer, was trusted by the Khmer Rouge but not a member of the Party. He, in turn, was known to be close to me. The leadership in the jungle relayed information to me in Washington this way. None of the intermediaries were told more than they needed to know beyond getting a message to me. Even if they were inclined to talk they didn’t have any information. The “former” diplomat in Paris had one fully equipped man, trained in China as a coded communication specialist, who could transmit and receive top secret messages from a counterpart in the jungle in times of crisis.

So, as always, I told my friend to reply I would be departing immediately and to relay the message that I would check into the specific hotel as instructed in Surin, Thailand within 72 hours. I boarded a plane from Washington’s Dulles international airport that night for the 36 hour flight to Bangkok. From Bangkok it was a 10 hour drive to the border town.

From the hotel, I dialed a contact number in Europe and informed my contact simply the number of the hotel room I had checked into. No names were used. No countries were mentioned. Certainly no words intimating any outlawed guerrilla groups culpable for committing crimes against humanity were uttered. Even the name of the hotel was omitted. “How are you, my friend?” I said. “I have arrived fine. I am in number 302. I will wait here.’

“I will let my friends know now. They will contact you. Be careful.” He couldn’t tell me who, where or what to expect or when I could expect to know when I would be contacted to not to be informed, then, either, of any of these details.

Then I waited….for days. I forget how many, but several. Mainly I stayed drunk. I did sit-ups and ran in place. I left the room for one hour each afternoon to swim at a lap pool in the town. I ate rice and noodles from the lobby nightclub, which doubled as a karaoke bar, coffee shop, and whorehouse. I prepared for an interview with Pol Pot I cleaned my camera equipment and read literature and documents on the Khmer Rouge I always kept for distraction. I had read everything at least once before.

I had no idea whether I was to walk through the jungle for days, whether I would meet important leaders, including Pol Pot, or when my contacts would arrive to retrieve me.

All that uncertainty requires contingency preparation: jungle clothes, still cameras, video camera, batteries, film, notebooks, hammock, mosquito net, food, rolls of chewing tobacco, whiskey and Ziploc bags of all sizes to protect against the daily monsoon rains. Everything had to fit perfectly inside a small Khmer Rouge knapsack on my back in case I had to walk for days.

And I couldn’t really leave the hotel room not knowing when the Khmer Rouge operatives would arrive and not wanting to draw attention to myself in a town where there are very few western visitors who aren’t up to no good. The small hotel staff knew me well after years of coming though, and it was no secret what, in general, I was up to. They knew I was going to nearby Cambodia, where there was a war, but they really didn’t want to know any more than that. I would always leave the lobby, usually before dawn, not checking out, dressed in jungle clothing with a backpack and laden with camera equipment. Often, I wouldn’t return for days, muddy and dirty and accompanied by fit men in crew cuts and sunglasses. These were my Thai military intelligence escorts who ferried me across the border through a myriad of Thai checkpoints who didn’t speak much and dressed in civilian clothes. They had a particular ID card that seemed to grip any other Thai official's attention with an immediate positive response and silent accommodation. This had always precluded the hotel staff previously of inquiring who I was or what I was doing.

This time there were no Thai officials to greet me and smooth my egress across national borders.

Then one rainy morning at 0600 there was a firm knock on the door. I asked who it was: First in Thai, then in English, then in Cambodian. After a long pause, a hushed voice replied in Khmer: “It’s me.”

TO BE CONTINUED……….

Copyright Nate Thayer. Excerpts from “Sympathy for the Devil: A Journalists Memoir from Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge” All Rights Reserved. No publication or citation permitted without author’s express written permission.)

November 22, 2011

‘I AM IN DANGER’: Duch talks of the risks to his life, even as he provides further details of Khmer Rouge death machine

By Nate Thayer in Battambang province

Far Eastern Economic Review

May 13, 1999

(Authors note: At the time of the publication of this interview, the UN special representative to Cambodia on Human Rights, Thomas Hammarberg, called for the Phnom Penh government to ensure Duch’s protection “from possible retaliation or attempts to reduce him to silence…because of his key role as a cadre at the heart of the political security machinery he is a crucial witness to some of the worst of human-rights violations which have occurred during this century. Because of the publication of his interview, his safety and life may seriously be in danger.” Hammarberg called for an “ad hoc international tribunal” to be set up outside Cambodia. “The Cambodian judiciary unfortunately is unfit to handle a trial of this complexity and magnitude,” he said, because it failed to meet certain conditions such as “a culture of respect for due process.” The charges proposed by a UN panel of experts cover crimes against humanity, genocide, war crimes, forced labour, torture, and crimes against internationally protected persons. I was asked by the court for raw copies of my taped interviews of Duch, Pol Pot, Khieu Samphan, Nuon Chea, Ta Mok, and Ieng Sary. I was also asked to be a witness and testify at the trial. I rejected both requests. Not because I oppose a trial for those indicted (and many others)--quite the opposite--but because I oppose being party to a politically motivated/manipulated/influenced show trial. Not to mention it is in violation of international standards of justice which forbid hearsay. And international law where if a person is alive and available to testify themselves, it is forbidden for a third party to quote that person when he is available to testify on his own behalf. A third reason, is I am a journalist, and portions of the interviews were given on various degrees of "on/off the record" and "background" basis. No court has the right to compel a journalist to reveal their sources. It undermines the whole basis of the role of a free press in a free society. But mostly, in this case, it is clear that there is little difference between this trial and a Stalinist era communist show trial where accused are cherry picked for political reasons, not based on an evidentiary process where investigators gather evidence, decide where they constitute sufficient, court admissible information to base an indictment, and then press charges. These defendants were pre determined for political reasons and many others were excluded, also for political reasons, despite overwhelming evidence of culpability sufficient for indictment. For Cambodians, it reinforces the reality of impunity from justice for those with political influence. This trial is being given the rubber stamp of approval by the UN and international community, sending a message to your average Cambodian peasant that there exists no where to turn where an independent judiciary will seek justice on their behalf. In thousand sof Cambodian villages, people remain alive and in political power who have committed crimes against international law and their victims have no recourse.)

Kang Kek Ieu’s name is usually spelled “Kiang” by scholars, but in his interviews with the REVIEW, he said he writes it as Kang. He is an odd looking man, his large head seemingly out of proportion to his short, thin body. His huge ears frame a wide grin, which exposes his missing teeth and the rotting remaining ones. Both eyes are unfocused, clouded grey-blue with what appears to be glaucoma. His left hand is missing its index finger and is curved like a claw, the result, he says, of an accident while cleaning a weapon in 1983.

He seemed calm about being exposed as a mass—murderer, even laughing briefly at the irony of being asked by the REVIEW to write his own “confession.” Presented with a rough biography to verify, as well as copies of orders he and other leaders issued to torture and kill prisoners, he spoke for days and wrote long descriptions of the workings and structure of the Khmer Rouge killing machine. In the process, he sometimes wept and expressed deep remorse.

He was intent on concealing his whereabouts. “I don’t want any man to know our relationship,” he told the REVIEW, “They will make me unsafe. I have no secrets from the Far Eastern economic Review, but I fear the people around me. I don’t know who is the man of Nuon Chea, of Ta Mok, of Khieu Samphan. I am in danger. My life is at risk. My sister will worry if I speak in Khmer. She will say, ‘My brother will die!’ They can kill me. They will say I am the man of the CIA who sold out to the USA.”

Duch said he had been visited by the local police chief after being seen talking to the review in this remote hamlet. “I see you are talking to the bad people,” Duch quoted the police chief as telling him, “You should be careful.”

There are many people who don’t want the truth to be known, leading the United Nations to fear for his safety. In a statement, the UN special representative to Cambodia on human rights, Thomas Hammarberg, called for the Phnom Penh government to promptly take steps to ensure Duch’s protection “from possible retaliation or attempts to reduce him to silence…because of his key role as a cadre at the heart of the political security machinery he is a crucial witness to some of the worst of human-rights violations which have occurred during this century. Because of the publication of his interview, his safety and life may seriously be in danger."

Hammarberg called for an “ad hoc international tribunal” to be set up outside Cambodia. “The Cambodian judiciary unfortunately is unfit to handle a trial of this complexity and magnitude,” he said, because it failed to meet certain conditions such as “a culture of respect for due process.” The charges proposed by a UN panel of experts cover crimes against humanity, genocide, war crimes, forced labour, torture, and crimes against internationally protected persons.

If Duch goes before an international tribunal, his evidence would potentially be damning. Among his statements to the REVIEW:

--“Foreigners don’t know who ordered the killings. I want to explain clearly to you: It was a decision of the central committee of the Communist Party. I followed the orders of my superiors, Nuon Chea and Son Sen, but I have great difficulty now, thinking that the people who died did nothing wrong.”

--“My superior first was Vorn Vet during the war time, then after liberation (in 1975) I reported directly to Son Sen. In July 1978, I was transferred to Nuon Chea when Son Sen went to command the fighting in the east with the Vietnamese.”

--Duch later killed Vorn Vet at Tuol Sleng (see “Death in Detail”) after he was purged. “Ta Mok personally arrested Vorn Vet at his house. (Standing Committee member) Ke Pok was there and hid under the bed, trembling with fear. Nuon Chea's wife told me this.” Ke Pok, who as a Khmer Rouge commander was implicated in the purges of the late 1970’s, is now a one-star general in the Cambodian army.

--“The decision to arrest all the women and children, the families of suspects, was made by the provincial committee, the regional leaders, or the central committee of the party. Everyone connected must be killed.”

--Duch said that photos were taken of all the prisoners sent to Tuol Sleng “to prove to the party that they were arrested. For some people, Nuon Chea wanted me to give him pictures of their dead bodies for proof. He ordered me to bring pictures of their dead bodies to his office.”

The arrest of Hu Nim, the former Khmer Rouge Minister of Information, was decided by the entire Central Committee, Duch said. But it was Nuon Chea and Son Sen who actually ordered the arrests and executions of purged cadres. “For arresting people, it was the everyday job of Nuon Chea and Son Sen.” Nuon Chea was in charge of the killing machine and “the second man for the killing was Son Sen.” (Son Sen is now dead; Nuon Chea is living freely in western Cambodia)

--Neither Vorn Vet nor Ieng Sary (the former Khmer Rouge Foreign Minister, now also living in Pailin) was present at the 1978 meeting at which the leaders decided to purge the Khmer Rouge eastern zone, Duch recalled. “Son Sen and Nuon Chea ordered the arrest and killing of many of the party leaders,” he said. Then, looking puzzled, he added: “I don’t know why.”

He described the process of distributing the confessions he extracted from his victims under torture: “I made four copies of every confession. I would give the original to Son Sen and keep one copy at Tuol Sleng. Son Sen would give a copy to Nuon Chea and Nuon Chea would give to others depending on the case. After July, 1978, I gave copies to Nuon Chea directly.”

I had a special telephone in my house direct to Son Sen that could not be tapped. Nuon Chea talked less on the phone, but preferred to write instructions and I would visit him at his office. Son Sen loved to talk on the phone, sometimes for more than an hour.”

The Khmer Rouge leaders are aware that the archives seized at Tuol Sleng are potentially incriminating, Duch indicated.” On 25 June 1986, Son Sen asked me, ‘What about the papers at S-21? (a name for the national-security apparatus)’ I told him the truth, that Nuon Chea didn’t tell me the Vietnamese were coming.” (Duch had already said that because of this lack of warning, he didn’t have time to destroy the papers) “Son Sen got very angry with Nuon Chea.”

Poring over some of the Tuol Sleng documents, which ordered the torture and killing of thousands of people, Duch said: “This is the handwriting off Nuon Chea. You see this handwriting is square; mine is oval, like Son Sen’s.”

Having spoken of the fates of eight westerners killed at Tuol Sleng, Duch also recalled the death of another foreigner, a French truck driver who had been working in Indochina before the Khmer Rouge took power. The man’s death was ordered by Ta Mok, Duch said. “I killed him in 1971. Ta Mok ordered me to kill him.” He said the Frenchman, whose name is being withheld by the REVIEW pending the notification of his family, ‘was very courageous. He explained to me about Catholicism.”

Though Duch seemed to realize that these revelations would change his life, he didn’t know quite how. “I guess I cannot work to build schools in my district now, “he said. He then asked whether he might get a job as a human rights worker.

By Nate Thayer in Battambang province

Far Eastern Economic Review

May 13, 1999

(Authors note: This article was written one week after the REVIEW published a several story package by myself and photographer Nic Dunlop. Dunlop had first located Duch, who was living under an alias doing social work and recognized his face, in a truly extraordinary focus by Dunlop on what was then one of the most notorious and in hiding mass murderers in the world, weeks earlier. While Dunlop took his photograph, he did not, with good reason, broach the subject with Duch of who he really was. The area was dangerous and Nic wanted to be sure it was indeed Duch, and be prepared for a negative reaction. He returned to Bangkok, contacted me, and we returned to a remote village in western Cambodia and confronted Duch with who he was. It was not a relaxing encounter. If Duch had chosen to, he could have disposed of us and no one would ever prove the details. This was hours from any communication with the outside and the heart of territory still controlled by nominally defected ex-KR. I knew the government had long been aware of Duch's location. And I had closely kept track of rumours of him for years which had him dead, working as a school teacher, a converted born-again Christian, and using a similar name to the alias he had introduced himself to Dunlop with. I had informed the REVIEW office that if I was not in contact in 48 hours, there was probably a serious problem. After a very brief denial when I asked if he "had ever worked for the security services between 1975 and 1979" (he contended he was a school teacher then), Duch took a second look at my business card, paused, and silently stared directly in my eyes for perhaps 30 seconds. He then said: "You are from the Far Eastern Economic Review. You are the one who interviewed Pol Pot and Ta Mok." Those seconds hung in the air far longer than was comfortable. "Yes," I said, " And we know who you are." Duch stared silently again for what seemed like forever, his mind obviously racing with the implications of the encounter, reached over, put his hand on my leg, and said "It is God's will you are here. My future is now in God's hands." And he never lied again. We brought copies of his own torture and execution documents from Tuol Sleng, many with his handwriting and those of Nuon Chea and others. He meticulously acknowledged and identified each one. I gave him a rough biography I had written of him and asked him to correct or add details. He did so with great focus adding many dates and events. I had contacted several Catholic and Protestant Priests and said I was going to meet with someone who had " perhaps killed many people" and asked which passages of the bible might such a person most relate to. ( The answer was Paul: "chief of the Sinners" who was himself a murderer and converted, confessed his sins, sought redemption, was forgiven, and was granted salvation. It was a passage that Duch knew by memory) After several days of interviewing him, the story was published in the REVIEW. We warned and made clear to Duch that his life would be in danger at 5:00 pm on that wednesday night, when the Review would send its normal press release of the next issues top storiies. We knew it would be picked up everywhere and broadcast in the VOA Khmer language service at 8:00pm that night. Arrangements were made for a secret arrest warrant to be issued in Belgium, so there would be legal authority to have him smuggled across the Thai border to safety, as many powerful people would have reason to silence him. Amnesty International and the UN Centre for Human Rights were pre alerted to the public release of the fact that Duch had been located. They were prepared to release public statements simultaneously with the story publication calling for the Cambodian government to ensure his safety as his life was in danger and he was a key defendent and witness for any trial on Khmer Rouge crimes against humanity. Duch was given mobile phone contacts for me in Battambang city, about two hours away, and told arrangements were in place for a safe house for him or to be smuggled out of the country if he felt his life was in danger. He chose to initially stay in his village. Within hours of the story being released, the very angry village police chief came to his house and said he was ordered to "come to a meeting.' A well known euphamism to Duch, he fled on foot and contacted me in Battambang. I checked him in under a pseudonym in the room next to mine at an obscure hotel. There, tape recorders were turned on and for a week he spoke in great detail of the entire machinery of the Khmer Rouge movement and specifics of many instances of war crimes and crimes against humanity and who ordered carried out and was involved. During this time, international pressure was significant; Governments called for his arrest, many called for his safety to be ensured by Cambodia authorities. The story was published but Duch had seemingly vanished again. After initial refusal, Hun Sen formally agreed to launch a government search for his whereabouts, and journalists descended on Battambang. As a journalist it wasn't my job to arrest him. It was also my responsibility to ensure he understood the consequences of his public statements and to ensure he wasn't murdered for speaking out to the REVIEW, as he had as much a right to due process of law as that he denied to thousands. I was beseiged by Cambodian government, military, diplomats and journalists demanding to know the whereabouts of Duch, who by this time had been known to have dissapeared from his village. One pro--government paper's front page banner headline was "Is Nate Thayer Hiding Duch?" above photogrpahs of us both. After a week, Duch decided he would seek, like Nuon Chea, Khiue Samphan, Ieng Sary and thousands of other former KR, the protection of a senior Khmer Rouge military officer who had 'defected' to the government and was now a general in the Hun Sen army. We both left the hotel at the same time, he to the compound of the General and a rather nervous me--with 40 hours of the only copy of tape recordings detailing the Khmer Rouge killing apparatus--by land through a myriad of government military checkpoints over the border into Thailand. Duch was immediately betrayed by his contact and was whisked by helicopter to Phnom Penh where he has been in prison ever since. This story is one of those published after the two weeks spent with Duch.)

This time, it was Duch’s turn to write his confessions. In the weeks since the REVIEW broke the news that the notorious Khmer Rouge security boss was still alive, Kaing Kek Ieu has been in hiding, answering verbally and in writing the magazine’s questions about his role in the movement’s 1975-79 reign of terror.

The revelations about his job as chief executioner were chilling enough. But even more importantly, he recounted in detail how senior Khmer Rouge officials ordered the mass murder of prisoners processed through Tuol Sleng detention centre, which Duch—as he was then known—directed. Notably, he implicated Pol Pot’s number 2, Nuon Chea, who is living freely in Pailin, western Cambodia.

Duch’s testimony, which began with last week’s article, is fueling calls for the arrest and international trial of surviving Khmer Rouge leaders. It has also made Duch the most wanted man in Cambodia, with the United Nation’s warning that his life is in danger from those who want him silenced.

Phnom Penh fears that moving against the Khmer Rouge leaders, who have officially defected to the government but still effectively control the ex-Khmer Rouge guerrillas surrounding Pailin, could plunge the country back into civil war. Only one Khmer Rouge leader—former military chief-of-staff Ta Mok—is in custody.

Duch, now a born-again Christian, said he was ready to testify against his former comrades and answer for his own crimes in front of an international tribunal. “It is Ok. They can have my body, Jesus has my soul. It is important that this history be understood. I want to tell you everything clearly.” And he did.

“I was a technician for the Communist party,” he declared, then went on to describe the inner workings of S-21, the Khmer Rouge security apparatus that he directed from Tuol Sleng, a converted Phnom Penh school where at least 16,000 people—many of them purged Khmer Rouge cadres and their families—were taken for interrogation. Only seven survived.

Duch said the policy of killing all prisoners was ‘an oral instruction of the party since 1971, when we were trying to rid our ranks of the enemy.” The definition of enemy expanded in 1973, when Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot decided that all cadres should come from the peasantry and the educated should be eliminated. “At that time many things changed and many people were killed,” Duch said.

Once the Khmer Rouge seized power, the internal purges widened. “After liberation in 1975, Pol Pot said: ‘We must protect the party and country by finding the enemies from within the Party. We are not strong enough to attack the enemies from outside, so we must destroy them from within.’ First we arrested the people in the north, then the southwest, then the northwest, then the east. He used Nuon Chea to do the work. Pol Pot never directly ordered the killings. Nuon Chea was always cruel and pompous. He never explained to the cadre, he only ordered them.”

Nuon Chea was in direct command of the Communist party’s killing machine, Duch said. “Vorn Vet and Chay Kim Hour were ordered killed by Nuon Chea,” he said referring to two top leaders. Duch said he personally carried out the orders. “I even had to exhume the body of Vorn Vet from the earth to take a picture of him dead because Nuon Chea wanted proof that he was killed.”

Duch said he also killed eight westerners at Tuol Sleng on Nuon Chea’s orders. “Nuon Chea ordered me to burn their bodies with tires to leave no bones.” The victims were from America, Australia, Britain, France and New Zealand, theoretically making their killers indictable in their country of origin. He said the foreigners were held for a month and tortured using electric shocks by chief interrogator Mam Nay, now a police officer in western Cambodia.

Duch’s testimony could also bolster the case against Ta Mok, the one-legged general who was captured in March, but as of early may, the authorities in Phnom Penh had made no effort to summon Duch to give evidence. “Ta Mok had his own prison,” Duch said—a revelation previously unknown to investigators. “It was located at Cherie O’Phnoe in Kampot province. Many were killed there.”

Duch said his technique for killing prisoners was superior to Mok’s. “I knew from experience that if they were only tortured they wouldn’t say anything. So torture had to be accompanied by psychological tactics; so I told them they would be released if they talked. This was a lie, but it worked. Ta Mok didn’t care about the mental state of his victims. He just tortured them and killed them.”

Duch’s execution methods were similarly efficient.” We had no instruction from the party on how to kill them, but we did not use bullets. Usually we slit their throats,” he said, drawing his finger across his aorta to demonstrate. “We killed them like a chicken.”

Asked about the thousands of women and children he killed, Duch turned away as tears welled in his eyes. “It was a fact that everyone in the Communist party knew that everyone arrested must be killed. Ask anybody in the party.”

Now that his past has been revealed, Duch clearly fears for his life. He sometimes spoke only in whispers, referring to Khmer Rouge leaders by their initials so that listeners would not recognize their names. At other times, he asked to be driven to remote areas to speak in a vehicle where he couldn’t be overheard. Over two weeks, the REVIEW conducted over forty hours of interviews that shed unprecedented light onto the workings of the Khmer Rouge.

“The decisions to kill were not made by one man, not just Pol Pot, but the entire central committee,” Duch stressed.

“Nuon Chea, he was the principal man for the killings. Pol Pot was interested in military strategy. Khieu Samphan did not have the right to decide who to arrest and order killed. He was a notetaker.”

“Pol Pot knew about S-21, but did not direct it personally. He left that job personally to Nuon Chea as No. 2 in the party and Son Sen as head of the army and police.” Then, shaking his head, he added: “They arrested nearly everyone by the end.”

The decision to purge thousands of cadre in the eastern zone in 1978 was taken at a secret meeting of top leaders, Duch said. “Pol Pot ordered it. At the meeting were Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot, and Son Sen.”

Duch said the purge reached its worst in the last weeks of 1978. “My prison was full. Nuon Chea ordered 300 (Khmer Rouge) soldiers arrested. He called to meet me and said, ‘Don’t bother to interrogate them—just kill them.’ And I did.”

The purge didn’t save the movement. Angered by repeated cross-border attacks by the Khmer Rouge, Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978 and captured Phnom Penh within two weeks. “It is true that the last days before the Vietnamese came I personally killed the remaining prisoners” at Tuol Sleng, Duch said. “I was called by Nuon Chea to his office and he ordered me to kill all the remaining prisoners.”

“I asked Nuon Chea to allow me to keep one Vietnamese prisoner alive to use for propaganda on the radio and he replied, ‘Kill them all. We can always get more and more.’”

“I was like a waterboy for Nuon Chea. He didn’t tell me that the Vietnamese were invading so I had no time to burn the documents. When I met Nuon Chea in 1983, he told me, ‘All the papers from the Party were burned except for yours. You are stupid.’”

Thousands of forced confessions bearing notations that Duch identified as his own, or those of Nuon Chea and others, were left behind at Tuol Sleng. The documents, including orders to torture and kill prisoners, would serve as key evidence in any trial of Khmer Rouge leaders.

“I think a trial is a very good idea. It is a good thing to arrest Ta Mok and Nuon Chea. And if Pol Pot and Son Sen were still alive, they should be tried as well. Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan did not have the right to decide the killings by themselves,” Duch said.

Pol Pot committed suicide in 1998, a year after ordering the murder of Son Sen. Khieu Samphan lives in Pailin with Nuon Chea and Ieng Sary, the former Khmer Rouge foreign minister.

Duch, who worked for several years for foreign aid organizations under various aliases, is uncertain about the future. “I guess that I will have to go to jail now, but it is OK. The killings must be understood. The truth should be known.”

Additional excerpts from Thayer’s interviews with Duch will be posted on May 7 on the REVIEW’s Web site. www.feer.com

November 16, 2011

No More Creampuff Journalism

(Below are a series of reader reactions to an interview I did with Khmer Rouge President Khieu Samphan. It wasn't pretty, but it was witty (mostly). Included is the article that sparked the outrage, The response of Michael hayes Publisher of the PPP, and my response)

Phnom Penh Post

Letter to the Editor

Friday, 29 January 1993

I was spending some vacation time in Phnom Penh when I picked up your paper and read the "interview" with Khieu Samphan. What's going on? This guy is a mass murderer and is single-handedly blocking a U.S. $2 billion international peace effort. Yet your "reporter" Nate Thayer treats Samphan like he was some kind of elder statesman, asking him what he thinks of the current political situation. Why didn't he ask him what it feels like to kill 1,000,000 Cambodians? I've read PR handouts that hit harder than this piece of marshmallow.Do your readers a favor-next time you interview the Khmer Rouge, send a real professional reporter-not a cream puff like this Thayer guy.

Bill Shuller, United States

Editor's Response

Phnom Penh Post

Letter to the Editor

Friday, 29 January 1993

Schuler has a point. Thayer faxed the raw transcript of the text of Khieu Samphan interview from Bangkok without his questions. While the text accurately reflected the content of the interview, it did not accurately reflect the questions posed. The interview should have been presented under topical categories rather than as a question and answer. We regret the editing error.

Thayer responds:

"I've been called a puppet lackey, an intelligence operative, a right wing jerk, a communist sympathizer, and a hopeless drunk, but I have never been called a creampuff and I resent it."- The Post welcomes comments from our readers.

Sour Creampuffs

Phnom Penh Post

Letter to the Editor

Friday, 12 February 1993

As a long-term resident of Cambodia who has been subjected to Mr. Thayer's Errol Flynnish style of journalism for most of that time, I must take exception to the use of the word "creampuff." It is extremely difficult to make a good creampuff in the tropics.

The term one should apply to this journalist is lightweight twerp.

Bill Lohan, Cambodia

Gentle Journalism

Phnom Penh Post

Letter to the Editor

Friday, 09 April 1993

I feeling so sorry for your reporter Kate Thayer called Gream Puff and Light Weight Werp in letters. So unfair! I read her interview with Mr. Khieu Samphan so interesting. Mr. Khieu Samphan of course is very bad man hates Vietnam people but reporter did no thing wrong. She just write down everything what she told very obedient and polite and not ask rude questions of important man her superior. Why call Gream Puff and Eroll Fling? My friends and I in the Ho Chi Minh Ladies Sewing Circle say, carry on Kate! Keep writing in your own gentle and lady like way!

Ho Chi Minh Ladies Sewing Circle

Khmer Rouge Chic

Phnom Penh Post

Letter to the Editor

Friday, 26 February 1993

The Post editor was kind enough to take the heat of poor Nate Thayer in answer to Phil Schuler's accusation of 'cream puff journalism' (Feb. 3 Post 2/3), But I fail to see why inclusion of the questions would have mitigated the impression. Didn't Thayer write the piece as published?

In addition to the list of names Thayer says he has been called, there was 'Khmer Rouge-chic' which I applied to some of his writing (see Indochina Issues 93, August 1991), and he attracts those names because of a persistence in treating the Khmer-Rouge as just ordinary guys with good intentions.

He asks for it again in his photo (Post, same issue, p.6) of a gentle Khmer Rouge soldier tenderly offering a smoke to a Vietnamese soldier, presumably a prisoner, when there is good information that the usual fate of captured Vietnamese was death.

In his latest article, "What role for Khmer Rouge", he quotes Pol Pot's talk of February 1992, in which he should have seen that Khmer Rouge obsession with the 'Youn' was a major theme. The Khmer Rouge imagine (and since it was a secret talk to his own cadres I assume it is what Pol Pot believes, not propaganda for affect) that the 'Youn' control Cambodia, that a 'Youn' army is what they are fighting, that there is now a U.S.-'Youn' alliance with the U.S. pressuring China, through human rights issues, to join the 'Youn', and that the object of the Khmer Rouge is to liberate Cambodia from the 'Youn'.

Those are the paranoid schizophrenics who are causing such international hand-writing over how to bring them into the 'peace process'. The present Khmer Rouge leadership should be kept out and isolated until they are no longer a threat, in particular because of their Vietnam policy which promises to keep Indochina in conflict for years ahead. This is not what the international community likes to think of, for anti-Vietnamese prejudice is widespread, not only among Khmer chauvinists, and the Khmer Rouge have played a useful role which several great powers may think should not go unrewarded.

Some heat should nevertheless be taken off Nate Thayer, for he is only following a trendy line which parallels the 'peace process' and is clearly reflected in the Paris Accords and the draft documents which preceded them, all designed to treat the Khmer Rouge as ordinary people in order to use them against the State of Cambodia. Observant readers like Schuler should focus their attention and ire on the entire UNTAC operation which is destroying Cambodia and giving new opportunities to an unreconstructed Khmer Rouge leadership, precisely as Pol Pot predicted in his remarks of February 1992.

Khieu Samphan:Gloomy Prospects for Khmer Elections

Friday, 06 November 1992

By Nate Thayer

The following interview with Khieu Samphan, president of the Partie of Democratic Kampuchea, was conducted at the Khmer Rouge compound in Phnom Penh.

Phnom Penh Post: What's your assessment of the status of the peace process, one year after the signing of the Paris peace accords? Khieu Samphan:Two key agreements have yet to be implemented. First, [there's] no control or verification of the withdrawal of Vietnamese forces from Cambodia. Secondly, agreements on the role of the Supreme National Council (SNC) have not been implemented.

We know that these two issues are interrelated. We have to have the SNC play a role; if the SNC has no role to play UNTAC will cooperate with the Phnom Penh regime. That is why UNTAC uses the phrase "pragmatic necessity," which means UNTAC relies on the Phnom Penh regime to implement the Paris accords.

How can UNTAC exercise the control and verification of the withdrawal of Vietnamese forces under these circumstances? Actually the Vietnamese forces, soldiers, officers, advisors and experts are the ones who maintain this regime in place. These Vietnamese forces are now in place to maintain the puppet army, secret police, and administrative apparatus.

If UNTAC relies on the Phnom Penh regime, UNTAC will not be able to find these forces, so this is the cause of the current deadlock. If we do not tackle the root cause of the current deadlock, we will not be able to break this deadlock.

Post: UNTAC may decide to hold the elections without the participation of the Partie of Democratic Kampuchea. What will it take for the PDK to join in the electoral process?

Khieu:As far as the election is concerned, if they have a plan to hold the election without the PDK (Partie of Democratic Kam-puchea), is this in accordance with the Paris agreements? What will the result of such elections be? The Vietnamese forces are still in Cambodia.

Such elections would offer Cambodia to the Vietnamese; this [all] the Cambodian people in Cambodia and living abroad will not accept.

So the question is whether UNTAC is going to hold the election without the participation of the PDK or implement the Paris agreement in its entirety. Such elections without the participation of the PDK run counter to the Paris agreement and we will oppose it.

Post: How do you assess the economic and security situation in Cambodia at present?

Khieu Samphan:Now everybody is talking about the corruption of [the Phnom Penh] regime being on the increase, and the riel has lost its value. The devaluation of the riel has created problems within all strata of the Cambodian people-between the poor and the Phnom Penh regime, state employees and the Phnom Penh regime, and soldiers of their own regime.

When UNTAC is trying to come to the rescue of the riel, this will only create problems between the Cambodian people and UNTAC.

[With] corruption and the devaluation of the riel spreading, this is a situation that creates more problems.

The Cambodian people are suffering. What will their reaction be to a situation where they see no hope? Anarchy perhaps, but the situation is they oppose the Vietnamese regime.

Let me turn to a specific problem: banditry. There are indeed elements not under any control. There are elements of the Phnom Penh army they cannot control. But [also], there is organized banditry by the Vietnamese and the Phnom Penh party.

How can we resolve this problem of banditry if the SNC continues to be denied its role? If the SNC is given its role, the Cambodian people [would] join the SNC in opposing banditry. Otherwise it will increase.

I think in any country where you have a government that is not supported, you will not be able to control banditry.

Post: How do you respond to charges that the Khmer Rouge blew up two bridges in Kompong Thom last month and is launching a dry season offensive?

Khieu Samphan:These accusations are not true.

Last year during the 14th dry season, during the whole dry season, the Vietnamese launched military operations against our forces-now they are doing the same in Battambang, Pursat, route 6, 21, 7.

During the 15th dry season there might be complicated problems. As the Vietnamese launch military attacks against our forces we will be compelled to fight back.

Post: Do you think that the peace accords are in danger of collapsing, returning Cambodia to a state of civil war?

Khieu Samphan: There is no peace now-the situation is the same as before [the signing of the Paris accords].

If they [UNTAC] have no political objective to get rid of the PDK, they will implement the Paris accords on the role of the SNC. Other measures to try to avoid giving the role to the SNC would not resolve the problem, and would be tantamount to trying to get rid of the PDK.

I am speaking very frankly here; if they try to do this, it is an abandonment of the Paris accords. We will not accept this. We should not underestimate or overlook the reaction of the Cambodian people.

I have told Akashi very clearly, if you try to paint a situation [of optimism that the peace plan is succeeding], you won't change the situation. I also try to convey that I am trying to cooperate with UNTAC.

I agree with you that we are on very dangerous ground. We are at an unpredictable juncture. I cannot say I am optimistic or not, [but] whoever does not implement the Paris agreements will encounter problems. They will increase the problems themselves.

There might be the possibility of anarchy by Cambodian people who might explode against the Vietnamese settlers themselves because of land stolen from the Cambodian people.

To sum up, UNTAC alone cannot control and verify the withdrawal of the Vietnamese forces and resolve the problem of crime in the cities, because of lack of support from the Cambodian people.

So far, [UNTAC] has tried to help the Phnom Penh party. As to when they will see that what they are doing is not working, I hope it will be soon. We hope that UNTAC will [realize that] before it is too late.

November 14, 2011

THE CAMBODIAN CONUNDRUM

Cambodia represents a case study of what can happen when U.S. drug policy and U.S. foreign policy interests collide

FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL

March 2002

By Nate Thayer

(This article details the way the U.S. war on drugs is actually played out in the real world, the hypocracy betwwen the rhetoric to hunt down and the reality of giving political protection to the powerful narcotics kingpins. U.S. policy is rarely implemented when the high level drug dealers have politcal protection from governments the U.S. has other wise good relations with. While billions are spent going after the small fish, making the U.S. have the highest percentage of people in prison than any other nation in the world--those in charge of narcotics trafficking are not just untouchable, but protected, and, too often, given the red-carpet treatment by the American government)

On April 8, 1997, Theng Bunma, Cambodia’s most powerful tycoon, upset at “rude” treatment from airline personnel, marched out onto the tarmac of Cambodia’s Poechentong International Airport, pulled out a Russian K-59 automatic pistol and shot out the tires of the Royal Air Cambodge Boeing 737-400 he had just arrived in from Hong Kong.

Bunma complained that the national airline had lost his luggage and refused to adequately reimburse him: “So I said, ‘If you do not pay me that, I will shoot your airplane—for compensation.’” He added: “If they were my employees, I would have shot them in the head.”

Yet Theng Bunma is no bombastic, small-time thug: He is arguably the most powerful man in Cambodia. “In Khmer we say, ‘He makes the rain. He makes the thunder,” said a senior Cambodian official. “Everybody knows that Theng Bunma can do what he wants.”

Theng Bunma intimidates every Cambodian, from noodle vendors to the Prime Minister. As well as, the record shows, the government of the United States.

“We have reliable reporting that he (Theng Bunma) is closely and heavily involved in drug trafficking in Cambodia,” a state department spokesman, Nicholas burns, said in July 1997.

But that public admission by the United States government was years in coming, and came only after an overwhelming and embarrassing mountain of public evidence emerged through the press, forcing Washington to acknowledge the reality it had long tried to suppress: Cambodia has become a classic narco-state.

Theng Bunma is a poster child for the weakness of America’s so-called war on drugs in narco-states like Cambodia. The record shows that the United States government has gone through years of acrobatics to turn a blind eye to Theng Bunma and his benefactors in the Cambodian government.

The U.S. dilemma is simple: successive administrations have been reluctant to implement strict “zero tolerance” policy directives against governments that protect, abet, and benefit from narcotics traffickers. U.S. law requires that they “decertify” these nations as being cooperative in fighting the drug trade, thus cutting off bilateral aid and, potentially, multilateral aid to these governments. But decertification might, officials argue, derail concomitant attempts to develop otherwise good relations with governments they are trying to nurture as “emerging democracies.” So, in Cambodia, the United States has avoided the mandate on the war on drugs.

It’s not that the United States isn’t aware who Bunma is. “Theng Bunma is a well known figure widely reported to be involved in drug trafficking,” a State Department official said in December 2001. But he also noted that Cambodian “cooperation with the Drug Enforcement Administration remains excellent” and said the U.S. government was pleased with “the reorganization of anti-narcotics coordination” within the Cambodian government.

“Cambodia has taken a number of positive steps,” the official said, citing $460,000 that the U.S. government gave in 2001 to the United Nations Drug Control Program to help Cambodian authorities combat drug trafficking.

Still, the U.S. reluctance to recognize the impunity with which Bunma conducts his international criminal enterprises provides a colorful case study of how organized crime, narcotics trafficking and political corruption, when left unchallenged, undermine fundamental tenets of democracy.

By 1997, Bunma represented the height of political and economic legitimacy in Cambodia. He had twice been elected president of the Cambodian Chamber of Commerce. His Cambodian diplomatic passport described him as “economic advisor” to the head of the ruling Cambodian People’s party. And because of his beneficence to royal charities, he held the high honorific title of “Okna,” bestowed upon him by King Sihanouk.

He is also the country’s single biggest taxpayer and landholder and owns its biggest newspaper. His Thai Boon Roong holding company owns banks, airlines, tobacco concessions, logging concessions, shipping fleets, hotels, casinos, and credit card concessions—among many other legitimate businesses.

With offices in Phnom Penh, Bangkok, and Hong Kong, his company is the single biggest corporate entity in Cambodia. Financial records put his net worth in the billions of dollars.

But that is not the source of Theng Bunma’s power. He is a narcotics trafficker. He runs a multi-billion dollar international criminal syndicate that lavishes money and gifts on Cambodia’s leaders. In turn, he is given political protection by the Cambodian government to do just about anything he wants.

Booming Business

Before the 1990’s, Cambodia was not involved in any significant narcotics activity. It was neither a producing country nor a transshipment route. But in 1991, the DEA began noticing—though not yet intercepting—shipments that left Cambodia and headed into a maze of fishing boats. The first drug shipment abroad identified as having originated in Cambodia, according to international investigators, was in 1993.

“In the last two years, we have seen a dramatic increase in Cambodia being used as a heroin smuggling point,” a senior Bangkok-based DEA official said in 1993. “Our intelligence is now picking up four to six shipments a year” of high grade refined heroin with “a minimum of 300 kilograms. The largest we have detected so far is 800 kilos.” (An interception of 300 kilos—660 pounds—of heroin would rank in the top ten drug busts from the Golden Triangle.)

Regarding Cambodian government anti-drug efforts, the DEA official scoffed:” The only thing hampering them is the weather.”

The formula is simple: Criminal syndicates involved in narcotics trafficking seek out week governments that, through the exchange of corruption money for political protection, allow them to conduct their criminal activities. Cambodia in the early 1990’s was just such a case, and organized crime descended to set up shop.

Bunma came to prominence in Cambodia in the late 1980’s. Though born in Cambodia, he carried fake passports and identity cards that identified him as a citizen of Thailand. And he had plenty of money for Cambodia’s political leadership, including both Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh and Second Prime Minister Hun Sen, political enemies who shared power in an uneasy alliance as the result of United Nations-sponsored democratic elections held in 1993.

In February 1994, U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia Charles Twining invited Finance Minister Sam Rainsy and another senior government official to a private luncheon at his residence. In his living room, Twining turned up the music and lowered his voice. According to Rainsy, Twining offered this warning:”Please tell Ranariddh not to get involved with Theng Bunma because we Americans have evidence that Theng Bunma is involved in drug trafficking.”

Twining, when asked to confirm the conversation, said through an embassy spokesman: “We don’t comment about confidential conversations with a host government.”

Airplanes and Limousines

The United States had reason to worry about penetration of the highest levels of the Cambodian government. Bunma’s many gifts to officials were legendary. In 1993, he paid $1.8 million for Ranariddh’s personal King Air-200 plane and gave Hun Sen the Mercedes limousines that ferried him to official functions. When the government was low on funds in 1994, Bunma underwrote the state budget with several million dollars interest-free “loans.” He paid the entire salary of the Cambodian army during their 1994 dry-season offensive against the Khmer Rouge.

According to one American narcotics official, Cambodia in 1994 was a place where criminal syndicates were “using government planes, helicopters, military trucks, navy boats and soldiers to transport heroin.”

It was also in February 1994—the same month that Twining warned the Cambodian government o distance themselves from Bunma—that the U.S. embassy did the opposite: Bunma was issued a U.S. visa so he could attend the Congressional Prayer Breakfast, with president Clinton the keynote speaker.

Bunma was accompanied by Interior Minister Sin Song, a former Khmer Rouge officer who eight months earlier has led a coup attempt. The two Cambodians were given the red-carpet treatment in Washington. They asked for and were granted a meeting with U.S. officials.

Attending the meeting at the Pentagon, were officials from the CIA, the State Department, the Department of Defense and other agencies. Sin Song, to the shock of the Americans, asked formally for U.S. support for another coup d’état. Bunma identified himself as the “financier” of the effort, according to three officials at the meeting.

In July 1994, a coup was indeed launched, but it too failed. Sin Song was arrested. So were 33 Thai officials, connected to powerful figures within Thai military circles, who had flown in from Bangkok. Their airline tickets on Cambodian International Airlines were all booked under the credit card of Bunma’s Thai Boon Roong holding company, according to the head of the airline. While dozens were jailed, no action was taken against Bunma.

In August 1994, the opposition newspaper Voice of Khmer Youth published a front-page profile of Bunma, accusing him, among other things, of having been arrested for drug smuggling in 1972. The report said he bribed his way out of jail and fled to Thailand. Less than a week after the article appeared, men in military uniforms gunned down its editor in broad daylight on a busy Phnom Penh street. No one has ever been arrested.

A Fine Line

In March 1995, the U.S. government issued its Narcotics Control Strategy Report, in which the State Department walked a fine line regarding Bunma and Cambodia: “Involvement (in the drug trade) of some leading businessmen with access to the highest levels of government is a known concern. There are indications that some high-level businessmen who give financial support to politicians are involved in heroin smuggling.” No names were given, however.

The report, ironically, outlined the effectiveness of “public diplomacy” in the U.S. war on drugs: “It is in the drug trade’s interest to remain behind the scenes working through corrupt government officials who can maintain a façade of probity and respectability. One of the best ways of routing out drug corruption is to expose it to public scrutiny. Corruption is a threat to any nation’s security, for it allows criminal elements to undermine the legitimacy of the state from within.”

Despite these concerns, the U.S. embassy issued Bunma another visa the following month, this time to accompany the Cambodian head of state, Chea Sim, and his official delegation to Washington. Chea Sim dined with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord, held talks with National Security Council officials and met—at the personal request of Ambassador. Twining—Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., among others.

The entire Cambodian government delegation’s rooms at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington during this visit were reserved for and paid in the name of Theng Bunma, according to the hotel.

Just prior to the U.S. visit, the State Department formally, but secretly, put Bunma on the visa ban list, according to department documents, but decided to issue a de facto waiver so that Bunma, described in his diplomatic passport as an “economic advisor,” could accompany Chea Sim. “We did not want to create problems at the start of what was an important bilateral visit,” said one embassy official.

Grounds for Exclusion

Placing Bunma on the visa blacklist, according to the U.S. government document, was based on State Department provision P2C, which cites section 212 of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Act: “ Controlled substance traffickers…who the consular or immigration officer knows or has reason to believe (are) or (have) been illicit traffickers…(are) excludable.” Bunma was also banned from entering the United States under another State Department provision (code “00”) covering other unspecified “derogatory information.”

“According to our records he (Bunma) does not hold a U.S. visa,” a State Department official said in December. “No determination regarding his eligibility to enter the U.S. can be made prior to his application, but we would obviously take all relevant facts into account.”

In June 1995, after Bunma and Chea Sim had left the United States, State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns reiterated longstanding official U.S. policy toward nations who fail to move against drug traffickers: “Governments that reward corruption and that allow trafficker influence to penetrate the highest levels of authority will have difficult relations with the United States.” But he was referring to events in Columbia, not Cambodia, and U.S. officials continued to avoid confronting the Cambodian authorities.

In November 1995, the Far Eastern Economic Review published a cover package entitled “Cambodia: Asia’s New Narco-State?” It detailed Bunma’s involvement in drug trafficking and criminal syndicates. A few days later, Hun Sen, a primary beneficiary of Bunma’s largesse, threatened that “a million demonstrators” might take to the streets to protest foreign interference in Cambodian affairs.

“Diplomats should stay indoors,” he warned. “I cannot guarantee their safety.” The United States sent a special envoy, Kent Wiederman, to try to calm the situation. Wiederman, then deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, emerged from a private meeting with Hun Sen commending his “commitment to human rights and democracy.” The French ambassador, who had just ordered the destruction of sensitive documents because of Hun Sen’s threat, reacted to Wiederman’s praising of Hun Sen by commenting: “What planet did he arrive from?”

On January 7, 1996—at the dedication of the new “Hun Sen park” on the Mekong River, paid for by Bunma—Hun Sen announced his government would “never abandon “ Bunma, “who has helped our party.” On the VIP dais were both Bunma and U.S. charge d’affaires Robert Porter.

Our Intelligence Was Clear

Several months later, a U.S. government regional drug conference was held in Bangkok, with attendees from State, the CIA, the DEA and other agencies. The Phnom Penh embassy official who supervised narcotics issues argued with representatives from other U.S. embassies and agencies who questioned why the U.S. embassy in Cambodia was refusing to acknowledge—let alone confront—Bunma as a drug trafficker.

“Our intelligence was clear and overwhelming that Bunma was a major player,” said a U.S. government official from another embassy who attended the conference. “We couldn’t understand what the Phnom Penh embassy was doing.”

The Phnom Penh embassy cited “suspicions but no proof.” Other American officials involved in narcotics policy were outraged.

On March 1, 1997, in its required annual report to Congress on narcotics, the State Department noted that “Cambodia made significant efforts towards taking control of the drug trafficking and transit problems” in 1996.

But according to Cambodian and Interpol records, the seizure by foreign law-enforcement authorities of drugs originating in Cambodia increased by more than 1,000 percent in 1996 over 1995.

The State Department report added that promises by the Cambodian government to crack down on officials involved in narcotic trafficking or corruption: have thus far yielded no concrete indictments or results.”

Yet they again officially “waived” Cambodia from being decertified as a nation that failed to move against drug trafficking.

The FBI Investigates

Later that month, a terrorist grenade attack targeting Cambodia’s main opposition leader, Sam Rainsy, killed 19 and wounded more than 120 on a bright Sunday morning in a peaceful gathering outside the parliament building. Rainsy was long a vocal critic of Bunma and Hun Sen, publicly linking them to the narcotics trade.

Because an American citizen, and employee of the congressionally-funded International republican Institute, was wounded in the attack, the FBI sent a team to Cambodia to assist the investigation.

A state Department spokesman told me on April 14, 1997, that with regard to drug money supporting the Cambodian government, “we are actively looking into reports that corrupt elements of the military and government may be facilitating drug trafficking, but we are not in a position to comment on those reports.”

By May, the FBI’s preliminary findings had concluded that the terrorists were linked not only to Bunma but to Hun Sen himself. They informed U.S. ambassador Kenneth Quinn that their investigation pointed to some of the prime minister’s top aides, including the head of his personal bodyguards.

Further, the FBI told Quinn, the grenade throwers appeared to be part of a paramilitary unit of assassins who were on the payroll of both the government and Bunma and operated out of one of Bunma’s hotels.

The next step, the FBI said, was to interview Hun Sen and give him a polygraph test. Quinn was not pleased at the potential diplomatic ramifications. Within days, he ordered the FBI team to leave Cambodia, citing “threats” to their safety from the Khmer Rouge. The source of the threats? Hun Sen.

“There is no question our investigation was halted by the highest levels because it was leading to Hun Sen,” said one American law enforcement official directly involved.

Quinn and others in the U.S. government privately argued that Cambodia’s stability was already teetering on the brink of civil war. To continue the FBI investigation to its logical conclusion would push the country over the edge, they contended. (Quinn did not respond to my request for comment).

The departure of the FBI team from Phnom Penh, didn’t, of course, help calm things down. It further bolstered those in the Cambodian government who felt, correctly, that they were capable of intimidating the United States and could act with impunity without harmful diplomatic consequences.

Between the growing fractious deterioration within the Cambodian coalition government, the rising international scrutiny focused directly on Hun Sen from the high-profile grenade attack on Sam Rainsy, and the very public international calls for increased pressure to stem the influence of organized-crime syndicates and drug traffickers over the corrupt Cambodian government, the pressure mounted—and the government imploded.

A bloody coup d’état occurred in early July 1997. The 2.8 billion dollar U.N peacekeeping effort, which began with the signing of the 1991 Paris Peace Accords and culminated in the 1993 elections, was now formally a failure. Civil war had returned. The winners of the election—Ranariddh and his supporters—were ousted from power and in exile; the losers—backers of Hun Sen—had full control. The Khmer Rouge, now allied with the ousted government leaders, was fighting from the jungle. And parliament, the press, opposition politics, a coalition government, and other tenets of the “emerging fragile democracy” had collapsed.

Perhaps no one was happier than Theng Bunma. In an interview shortly after the coup, he boasted of having given millions of dollars in cash and gold to Hun Sen to finance it. “For the clash of 6 July 1997, I called Mr. Hun Sen and I talked to him. I gave him one million dollars to do whatever the control the situation,” said Bunma. “He asked me whether I had the money in Cambodia….I said I would send one hundred kilograms of gold in a plane to Cambodia.”

“I say what Hun Sen did was correct,” Bunma said. “Why? One reason. Take the example of my hotel.” Hun Sen “put three tanks and soldiers around to protect it.”

No Formal Linkage

A few days after this interview appeared in the Washington Post, the U.S. government publicly stated, for the first time, that Theng Bunma was a drug trafficker. But State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns hastened to add that the United States “does not have evidence that links Hun Sen himself, personally, to these accusations of drug trafficking.”

“We think the Cambodian government can do a lot more to purge itself of obvious corruption in the government, of obvious linkages between…members of the government and narco-traffickers,” Burns said.

Burns careful separation of Bunma from Hun Sen was no coincidence. It allowed the State Department to avoid the conclusion that the Cambodian government itself was involved in drug trafficking. Such a conclusion would require the United States to decertify Cambodia, with all its implications—including cutting off bilateral aid and voting against loans from the IMF, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and other multilateral aid. That would have been the death knell for a government that derived almost half its budget in 1996 from such sources.

It was the same reason the U.S. government refused to label the “events” of July a coup d’état. That also would require a cessation of aid to Hun Sen’s government.

In June 1998, the Thais issued an arrest warrant for Bunma, who was charged with fraud for allegedly providing false information to obtain a Thai identity card and passport under two different names. In 1999, criminal charges were brought against Bunma in Hong Kong for falsifying immigration documents. Later the prosecution dropped all charges after the Cambodian Foreign Minister, Hor Nam Hong, presented a diplomatic note citing Bunma’s “top honors and ranks” to the Hong Kong court. “Mr. Theng Bunma has claimed diplomatic immunity through his lawyers. The Royal Government of Cambodia has claimed diplomatic immunity on his behalf,” the court said, “The administration has carefully considered the claims and has concluded that Mr. Theng is entitled to immunity from criminal jurisdiction. In those circumstances, the prosecution has decided to drop the charges,” said the Hong Kong government spokesman

And while the Thai arrest warrants remain open, Bunma’s connections in powerful circles in Thailand have prevented any movement to touch him.

On June 18, 2000, Bunma’s daughter was married to a Thai army officer in a lavish ceremony in Phnom Penh. It was hardly a quiet affair.

The Thai military’s Supreme Commander, Gen. Mongol Ampornpisit, chartered a military plane from Bangkok full of top army officers. Hun Sen’s wife was guest of honor and a witness to the engagement ceremony. Cambodia’s defense Minister Gen. Tea Banh, served as the bride-to-be’s sponsor. The Interior Minister, Sar Kheng, also attended. The Bangkok Post reported that “diamond jewelry and stacks of cash” were presented to the bride and groom.

A “Transit Route”

After the coup of 1997, under pressure from Congress, the United States suspended most of its bilateral aid to Cambodia. According to the State Department’s Narcotics Control Strategy Report released in March 2001, “U.S.-Cambodia bilateral narcotics cooperation is hampered by restrictions on official assistance to the central government that have remained in place since the political disturbances of 1997” and “remained suspended in 2000.”

“Cambodia’s principal involvement in the international narcotics trade is as a transit route for Southeast Asian heroin to overseas markets, including…the United States,” the report says.

The report cites Cambodia’s National Authority for Combating Drugs (NACD) as “playing a central role, provid(ing) more effective measures” and said the NACD had the potential “to become an effective policy and coordination tool for the government.”

The same report also noted that in 2000 the deputy police commissioner had alleged that four senior Cambodian government officials—including the former and current heads of the NACD and a deputy commander-in-chief of the Cambodian military—had accepted bribed from narcotics traffickers.

Nevertheless, a few months later, President Bush removed Cambodia from the list of “major Drug-Producing or Transit Countries.” According to the White House,” The only change in the list from the previous year is the removal of Cambodia.”

“I have removed Cambodia from the major’s list,” said President Bush in a prepared statement dated November 1, 2001. “Cambodia was added to the Majors List in 1996 as a transit country for heroin destined for the United States. In recent years, there has been no evidence of any heroin transiting Cambodia coming to the United States.”

November 13, 2011

Foot Soldiers from Rival Armies Share cynicism About Leader

By Nate Thayer

Phnom Penh Post

Friday, 07 August 1992

NORTH OF HIGHWAY SIX, Cambodia--From a trench in abandoned ricefields in Kompong Thom province, young conscripts of Phnom Penh's army peered wide eyed from their foxholes as two journalists and a score of heavily armed guerrillas emerged from enemy controlled jungles and approached them.

Popping up from camouflaged foxholes, they grabbed automatic rifles, and curiously approached the group. The soldiers-from rival factions-greeted each other warily.

For the guerrilla fighters, it was the first time they had spoken to the enemy in more than 13 years of war, although some knew each other by reputation.

A soldier was dispatched to seek a superior's approval for a request for the journalists to pass into Phnom Penh territory. While waiting, the young men exchanged cigarettes and asked about each other. It turned out a guerrilla and his government counterpart came from the same village in the far away province of Prey Veng.

"You see what the war has done to us," said Meas, a guerrilla fighter, pointing to the Phnom Penh soldier. "We could be related and we wouldn't know it."

Meas had fled Cambodia's turmoil to the Thai border more than a decade before, eventually joining the guerrilla faction led by Prince Norodom Ranariddh. The Phnom Penh soldier had been drafted into the army some three years earlier and sent to the jungle.

Another Phnom Penh soldier said that he had recently found out that his brother, who had been missing since the Vietnamese invasion in l979, was a soldier with the guerrillas.

"Do you know my brother and if he is well?" he asked the guerrilla.

Another young fighter said, "Now in Cambodia, a whole generation must ask our elders if we are related, because we don't even know who we are since the war split us apart."

"In Cambodia, all our leaders are getting rich while we suffer," another soldier added. Everyone nodded in agreement. It was a theme we heard everywhere.

A photographer from Impact Visuals photo agency and I had rented a Soviet jeep in Phnom Penh and set off alone on a 15-day journey that would take us through nine provinces, across dozens of minefields and frontlines to territory under the control of all four Cambodian factions.

Many Cambodians living under the control of, or working for each of the four factions expressed deep cynicism and resentment towards their leaders whom they blame for incompetence, corruption, and continuing a conflict largely for personal gain. Soldiers from all four factions said they had not been paid for months, and worried about what would happen to them in a post-war Cambodia.

No commanding officer could be found that day, and after some debate, we were allowed to pass, for the 100 kilometer trip back to Kompong Thom city.

Soon after our arrival, two Phnom Penh interior ministry police officials arrived at our guesthouse. Initially, they were not happy.

"My job is to protect the party," the young intelligence officer announced rather cheerfully. "You have no permission to be here and I have to ask you some questions."

After an hour of interrogation, the intelligence officer asked whether we could talk as friends. "I hear that maybe I will not have a job after cantonment and demobilization," he said, "Is journalism a good job? How is the pay? I think we have similar jobs. We both have to ask a lot of questions and find out what is going on."

In Banteay Meanchey province, large tracts of land have been made uninhabitable by mines planted during heavy fighting for control of the area.

Soldiers guided us through oxcart paths snaking through mined ricefields, across frontlines, delivering us to forward checkpoints of their erstwhile enemies.

During more than a score of such transfers, we would request a couple of soldiers from a forward position to accompany us for security until we reached another faction's base.

There was never a shortage of volunteers, most eager for a break from the boredom of isolated outposts. Because of the abundance of mines and bandits, it was good to have guides with weapons who were familiar with the terrain.

Killings and robberies were daily events in the area where rogue bands of former soldiers from each of the four factions routinely ambush anyone with valuables.

The young fighters in the guerrilla zones would pepper us with questions: Are there a lot of Vietnamese in Phnom Penh? Are there jobs for people like me? Do you think we will be safe and welcomed back now that the war is over?

It was not unusual for our Soviet jeep, which we rented from an army officer in Phnom Penh, to be filled with a half dozen fully armed uniformed soldiers from different factions. We would discuss politics but mostly their fears for the future and being able to provide for their families after years of living in the jungle.

In scrubland north of the district capital of Banteay Meanchey, we drove to isolated villages under the control of the Khmer Rouge, where villagers and Khmer Rouge cadre spoke about their hopes for the future.

"We must rid the country from the Vietnamese first before the war can stop," said one Khmer Rouge cadre. "But we all want peace. Everyone has suffered enough."

"I don't know why so many people died when we were in power," said one young Khmer Rouge fighter, who seemed genuinely perplexed by the issue.

A Khmer Rouge medic we met at a Khmer Rouge division headquarters near the Dongrek mountain escarpment asked if we could give him a ride south so he could pick up some medical supplies.

"You are American," he said cheerfully. "Do you know my sister? She lives in New York." He said that he had spent three years in China training as a medic, and was proud of his skills.

"I can do any kind of operation, but mostly amputations," he said.

I asked him how many amputations he had performed. "Oh, too many to count," he said, "At least 200."

In the bustling market town of Tmar Pouk, under control of the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, government soldiers in uniform mingled easily with their former enemies.

"We don't have any problems with each other," one said. "We are just regular soldiers. It's our leaders who can't get along."

One KPNLF soldier asked whether he could accompany us back to Phnom Penh controlled town of Sisophon. He could not cross the frontlines by himself, but he said with foreigners he had a chance. He wanted to catch a bus from Sisophon to visit his mother near Siem Reap, whom he hadn't seen in ten years.

"I left home to join the KPNLF when I was 12," he said. Quickly removing his jungle fatigues and switching to civilian clothes, he got in the back of the jeep, sharing the seat with an elderly woman who was returning to her government-controlled village after visiting her son, a KPNLF officer.

A guerrilla fighter guided us to an oxcart path. "Just drive along the tracks of the oxcart," he said, "Don't leave the path. Both sides are mined."

Further down Highway 69, where hundreds died in recent years' fighting for control, rogue soldiers piled mortars on the road in a crude roadblock. Soldiers with grenades in one hand and assault rifles in the other, stopped the rare vehicle demanding money.

"They don't get paid enough to eat," said the soldier in the back, after we passed.

"I'm glad I'm with you," the mother said, "They would have taken everything I had if I was alone."

We left the two passengers in Sisophon. "I don't even know if my mother is still alive," the soldier said.

November 12, 2011

Expat Returnees pose legal questions for the West

Phnom Penh Post

Friday 10 March 1995

By Nate Thayer

Some come back for the best of reasons, some are "less than altruistic." Expat returnees are posing hard legal questions for their adopted homelands. Nate Thayer reports.

WHEN Sok Chenda Sophea returned to Cambodia in 1992 after nearly two decades in exile in France, he came with a vision of doing his part to help rebuild his shattered homeland. The 38 year old Chenda, now an under secretary of state for the Ministry of Tourism , cuts a sharp figure with his European tailored suits, fluent French and English, and university and professional background in advertising and tourism promotion. His government salary is the equivalent of US$27 a month.

Likewise, Samnang Siv, 39, quit her US$90,000 a year job working for a biotechnology firm in Massachusetts in the US in April 1994 and returned to Cambodia. Leaving behind her husband and 20 year old son, she now serves as an advisor to the Minister of Tourism, and, with fluency in three languages and her dynamic personality, has been instrumental in assisting foreign companies to come to Cambodia and invest.

"I have been given 40 liters of petrol for my car," she says, and no salary yet. "I just want to contribute my knowledge, my skills, and help my government. I think they need people like me."

In a country whose most decimated commodity after decades of warfare is it's human resources, Sok Chenda and Samnang Siv are exactly what Cambodia needs to get back on it's feet. And there are hundreds of Khmers like them who have brought back their technical expertise, leaving behind "the good life" for reasons that are explained in terms little more complicated than a patriotic commitment to their native lands. "I just want to help my country and people," says Chenda.

But along with the good has also come the bad. Cambodia is choc-a-bloc with scores of corrupt and rapacious ethnic Khmers, many holding foreign citizenship and passports, who have returned since the fall of communism and are now officials in the new government. According to many businessmen and other Cambodian officials, the ranks of government are filled with foreign citizens lining their pockets with kickbacks.

"Oh boy," says Chhang Song shaking his head, "We were puritans compared to these guys."

Chhang, a former Minister of Information in the notoriously corrupt, US-backed Lon Nol regime that fell to Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in 1975, is an American citizen from Washington, DC who recently returned to serve as an advisor to the current government.

The recent phenomena of foreign citizens returning to participate in the rebuilding of their countries since the collapse of communism and the cold war has raised a new set of legal and other complexities for the mostly western governments that the returnees hail from. While Cambodia stands out as a particularly stark example, it is also increasingly common in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and the Baltic states.

A recent Prime Minister of Bosnia Herzogovina is an American. And in 1992, when an American citizen was chosen as defence minister of the newly independent Lithuania, the U.S. government forced him to make a choice between his passport or the job. A recent Foreign Minister in Armenia was also an American. A Wisconsin politician, Rudy Perpich, was considering accepting the post of Prime Minister of Croatia in 1991. But when U.S. authorities informed him they could not guarantee that he could maintain his American citizenship, he declined the position, according to U.S. diplomats.

But nothing compares to Cambodia. Senior officials who are citizens of foreign countries include the Queen, the First Prime Minister, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Interior, Education, Agriculture, Rural Development, Women's Affairs, Tourism, Information, and even Culture.

As well, the head of the powerful Cambodian Development Council, at least 30 members of Parliament, numerous provincial governors, secretaries and under secretaries of state, civil servants, ambassadors, and military generals hold foreign citizenships.

The bulk of these officials hold French, American, or Australian passports, but Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and Switzerland are also represented. Most fled on the heels of the communist victory in 1975 or through refugee camps on the Thai border set up after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in late 1978.

"On the one hand we want to encourage them to come back to help reconstruct their country," says a US diplomat, "This is a good thing. But there are complications."

While American law states that a US citizen cannot take an oath of allegiance to a foreign government, the law is rarely enforced. "The policy has shifted over the years since the end of the cold war," said a US government lawyer familiar with the issue. "We now approach these on a case by case basis."

One reason, say diplomats from several governments, is that many of the senior officials in the newly emerging democracies would not return to help reconstruct their homeland if forced to give up their foreign citizenship. " The political situation remains unstable during the transition period in many of these countries. They fled for their lives to exile once before, and they want to keep that option open," said a Phnom Penh based diplomat.

A US government internal cable sent to all embassies in February offered instructions on how to deal with U.S. citizens serving foreign governments. It cited several "potentially expatriating acts" which include "joining another country's armed forces" or "taking an oath of allegiance to another government". Scores of Cambodian-Americans fit that bill. It also requires embassies, under section 349 of the US Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 , to inform Washington of any "high level official in a foreign government in a policy making position" who is an American citizen.

But US diplomats say that the courts have now interpreted that Americans can serve in foreign governments as long as they had "no intent of relinquishing citizenship." In effect, it is largely up to the American citizens, according to current US government legal interpretation, whether they choose to give up their citizenship when they join the ranks of a foreign government.

Indeed, foreign governments find benefits in having their citizens in positions of influence. It does not hurt Australia, for instance, to have the Cambodian Foreign Minister hold Australian citizenship. Nor is it detrimental for Australia-which dominates the telecommunications industry in Cambodia-to have Australian citizens in charge of the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications.

The French, who have campaigned strongly for the reemergence of Francophone in Indochina, can only be pleased to have the Cambodian Minister of Culture a French citizen. And the Americans have used Cambodia's top cop, an American citizen, You Hokry who hails from Maryland and serves as minister of interior, to get US citizens in a pickle extra attention.

But there are numerous potential minefields in this new post cold war phenomena. It is well known that many Cambodian government officials who hold dual nationalities are lining their pockets with kickbacks, and their reasons for returning to Cambodia may be less than altruistic. Some Cambodian officials believe that many are here to cash in and have little interest in remaining in Cambodia.

But if they are US citizens, they must file US taxes. "The law is clear. You must declare all your income, whether illegal or legal," said a spokesman for the United States Internal Revenue Service. The US tax laws are often used to collar bad guys involved in more difficult-to-prove criminal activities, such as drug running. As an example the IRS spokesman cited Al Capone, the famous US gangster of the 1930's, who was ultimately jailed for tax evasion. It is common practice for Cambodian government officials to receive kickbacks, and rumors abound of the millions of dollars being pocketed by various officials.

Current Finance Minister Kiet Chhon, estimated that lost revenues from corruption is about US$100 million a year-or more than one-third of internally generated revenue.

"It is shameful," he said.

Senior government ministers privately grouse about a number of their colleagues who are on the take. One example is over a recent US$1.3 billion contract awarded to a little known Malaysian firm, Ariston, for gambling casinos and related development projects in the seaside resort of Sihanoukville. Two senior government officials say they have "proof" that another senior government official-who holds an American passport-received a US$10 million kickback for awarding the contract to Ariston. They say that other companies, including the American hotel firm Hyatt, who bid for the contract "never had a chance" and the corrupt process did "immeasurable damage to our reputation among investors."

Former Finance Minister Sam Rainsy, sacked last fall, and the country's most aggressive anti-graft fighter, said on March 2: " I have spoken with one of the other bidders which did not win the contract...They have been asked ten million dollars in cash. They (were told ) that 'if you give us 10 million US dollars the contract is for you.'" Senior government sources say the official who received the kickback is an American citizen and the company in question which was denied the contract was an American firm. American companies are prohibited by American law from paying bribes to foreign governments, but it is unclear whether American citizens working for foreign governments can receive them without breaking American law.

"In the last few months, the Royal Government of Cambodia has signed a number of contracts with foreign private companies in circumstances which are, to say the least, dubious. These dubious contracts are seriously harmful to the country, the administration of which has become more chaotic and less transparent," said Rainsy. He himself is a French citizen, an elected Member of Parliament, and regularly rates as one of the Kingdom's most popular politicians in public opinion polls.

Furthermore, it remains untested, say legal experts, whether foreign nationals holding senior government portfolios could be charged under criminal and civil laws that apply to the country they hold citizenship in. Of particular concern could be such positions as Minister of Interior or senior officers in the Ministry of Defence who hold American or other passports and ultimately are responsible for the conduct of their subordinates, human rights lawyers point out.

In Cambodia, both the police and military have been repeatedly implicated in human rights abuses including torture and murder in recent years. Rarely, despite cases with overwhelming evidence, are the offenders arrested or prosecuted. The U.S. Torture Victims Protection Act does allow for American authorities to prosecute American or other citizens implicated in torture overseas.

Amnesty International, in a report to be released on 14 March, a copy of which has been obtained by the Post said "members of the armed forces and police are able to impose their will on the civilian population with impunity, committing acts of violence including deliberate and arbitrary killings and extra judicial executions....the Cambodian authorities appear to lack the political will and ability to bring these violators to justice." The report, and an earlier one released by the United Nations Center for Human Rights, cite numerous cases of torture, including military officers involved in eating the livers and gall bladders of their prisoners, and cutting off the heads of prisoners who are alive and under interrogation. The government has, to date, refused to arrest the officers involved.

"Theoretically, they could be charged with, say, conspiracy to obstruct justice," said one human rights lawyer, citing superior officers - who hold foreign citizenship - of subordinates involved in torture. The Cambodian Co-Minister of Interior and scores of senior officers in both the national police apparatus and the military hold US passports.

But "There would have to be some act committed on American soil," insisted a US government lawyer responsible for analyzing such issues. "In general, U.S. law does not follow them around."

But Cambodia's reputation for political thuggery has even spilled over to American soil. Last year, a Cambodian general-an American citizen- was back in California and allegedly threatened a California-based, Khmer language newspaper editor with arrest and death if he returned to Cambodia because of articles critical of the new government, according to complaints filed with U.S. authorities by the newspaper.

U.S. government sources say the general was back in the U.S. to take care of his annual tax obligations, when he read the articles that offended him.

And last month, when an American relief worker in a remote province suffered a heart attack, an official of the Civil Aviation Authority refused to allow an emergency medical airplane run by a non-profit Christian relief organization to take off from Phnom Penh until "fees" were paid. The Civil Aviation official is an American citizen. Could an American citizen be charged with relevant criminal or civil complaints-such as extortion-committed against another American citizen, even though the criminal act was committed on foreign soil? Such questions are largely, so far, in uncharted territory.

"To tell you the truth, we don't like to talk about it. It's a headache," said one American diplomat.

POL POT: UNREPENTANT

An Exclusive Interview

Cover Story

Far Eastern Economic Review

October 30, 1997

(Three story cover package)

The world holds Pol Pot responsible for the deaths of more than 1 million Cambodians. But the former Khmer Rouge leader, now a jungle captive of ex-comrades, expresses no remorse. In an historic, exclusive interview with Nate Thayer he defends himself as a patriot. His two-hour exposition ranges over the notorious killing fields, atrocities, party intrigues and his own early life. Plus:The first ever interview with Khmer Rouge strongman Ta Mok

Day of Reckoning: Pol Pot breaks an 18-year silence to confront his past. In defending his murderous rule, he sheds new light on the dark secrets of the Khmer Rouge

By Nate Thayer in Anlong Veng

Far Eastern Economic Review

October 30, 1997

P OL POT is dying. He's helped slowly out of the backseat of a blue four-wheel drive truck, then stands unsteadily in the dust of the narrow road, smiling shyly and raising his clasped hands to his face in a traditional greeting.

He needs to grasp my arm to walk the 25 meters to an open-air hut, in a clearing hacked out of the dense jungles of the Dangrek mountains. His breathing labored, he eases himself down at a simple wooden table.

A deferential young KR cadre places a plastic bottle of water and a coffee jar filled with salt in front of him. Pol Pot adjusts his traditional peasant scarf, his face drawn and eyes blinking rapidly, and looks sadly across the table at the nearest thing to an interrogator he has ever faced.

The man who presided over the Cambodian holocaust is about to give his first interview in 18 years. It's his chance to make some kind of peace with his bloodstained past, to try to atone for a four-year reign of terror that left a million or more of his countrymen dead. He refuses.

"I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people," he rasps, his voice almost a whisper. He pauses, fixing his interviewer with an almost pleading expression. "Even now, and you can look at me, am I a savage person? My conscience is clear."

In a two-hour interview, Pol Pot is chillingly unrepentant about the horrors of his 1975-1978 rule over Cambodia. His humanity shows only when he talks about himself or his family; he describes in detail his youth, the origins of his political ideology, his health problems and his 12-year-old daughter's difficulties in school.

Grilled on his culpability for the mass murders, disease and starvation of the late 1970s - when his regime tried to turn Cambodia into a collectivist agrarian utopia - he comes back time and again with the same basic line: The KR made "mistakes," but without their unrelenting struggle Cambodia would have been swallowed by Vietnam.

"I do not reject responsibility - our movement made mistakes, like every other movement in the world. But there was another aspect that was outside our control - the enemy's activities against us. I want to tell you, I'm quite satisfied on one thing: If we had not carried out our struggle, Cambodia would have become another Kampuchea Krom in 1975," he says, referring to the Mekong Delta region, seized by Vietnam from the Khmer empire in the 17th century.

Pol Pot even claims that the notorious Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, where the KR meticulously documented their torture and execution of 16,000 suspected "enemies," was a Vietnamese propaganda exhibit.

Yet the rare trip into the KR stronghold of Anlong Veng yielded some stunning revelations. The KR commander who ousted Pol Pot in June, Ta Mok, acknowledged in his first interview ever that "hundreds of thousands" of people had died during the group's time in power. Neither he nor other KR leaders interviewed would admit personal responsibility; instead, they point fingers at Pol Pot or one another.

Pol Pot does admit that he ordered the killing of his longtime comrade-in-arms Son Sen, slain on June 10 along with 14 family members, including grandchildren. "You know for the other people, the babies, the young ones, I did not order them to be killed. For Son Sen and his family, yes. I feel sorry for that. That was a mistake that occurred when we put our plan into practice. I feel sorry. You asked me to say something." Then he says abruptly: "Now I want to talk about the present situation in Cambodia."

It was Son Sen's killing that brought about Pol Pot's ouster from the helm of the revolutionary movement he led for 37 years. Ta Mok, who was also targeted but escaped, arrested Pol Pot on June 19. Five weeks later, Pol Pot was brought before a "people's tribunal" in Anlong Veng and sentenced to life imprisonment for Son Sen's murder.

The KR decided to make Pol Pot's ouster public, hoping to win international support for their battle against the government of Premier Hun Sen. They allowed this journalist to witness the July 25 tribunal, the first time Pol Pot had been seen by a journalist in 18 years. But an interview with the deposed leader took months more to arrange, through intensive contacts with a series of secret operatives both inside and outside of Anlong Veng. It took place on October 16.

For now, that's as far as the KR will go. Pol Pot is not going to be turned over to an international tribunal to face charges of crimes against humanity, Ta Mok said in a separate interview. "I will turn Pol Pot over no problem, if you bring Hun Sen and they go together," he says, setting an unrealistic condition.

Trial or no trial, Pol Pot's line of defence is the same: His youthful, inexperienced movement made "mistakes" under pressure from its enemies, but they saved the country from Vietnamese annexation. Asked whether he wanted to apologize for the suffering he caused, he looks genuinely confused, has the interpreter repeat the question, and answers: "No."

"We had no other choice. Naturally we had to defend ourselves," he says. "The Vietnamese... wanted to assassinate me because they knew without me they could easily swallow up Cambodia."

The anti-Vietnamese rhetoric isn't surprising: the ultra-nationalism of the KR became evident when they started raiding the territory of their erstwhile Vietnamese communist allies in Vietnam in the years after seizing power. But Pol Pot reveals that distrust between the two communist movements dates back to at least 1970, when Le Duan and other Vietnamese leaders tried to persuade him to take nominal command of a combined Cambodian-Vietnamese-Laotian army to fight the American-backed governments in Phnom Penh and Saigon.

"Le Duan and Le Duc Tho, they told us: 'You don't have to fight. You should wait until the Vietnamese victory then the Vietnamese will come and liberate you'," Pol Pot says.

Instead, he raced to beat the Vietnamese to victory. He says that by capturing Phnom Penh on April 17, two weeks before the communist victory in Saigon, the KR saved Cambodia from Vietnamese communist occupation. And immediately, he contends, he took steps to balance Vietnamese influence in Cambodia. "In May 1975, I sent my foreign minister to Thailand because I knew that the east is very savage... what I wanted was to have a friend in the West. Vietnam was furious at me."

There may be truth in Pol Pot's claim that Vietnam had designs on Cambodia. But he goes on, outrageously, to blame even the mass starvation during his rule on the Vietnamese. Nobody knows the precise figure, but during their 1975-1978 rule the "Democratic Kampuchea" regime killed perhaps 200,000 people, many from its own ranks. For every person executed, perhaps seven more died of starvation or disease as a result of the KR's inept central policies.

"To say that millions died is too much. Another aspect you have to know is that Vietnamese agents, they were there. There was rice, but they didn't give rice to the population," Pol Pot claims.

Even more outrageous is Pol Pot's claim that Phnom Penh's notorious Tuol Sleng prison was a "Vietnamese exhibition" set up for propaganda purposes after Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978 and drove the KR from power. Scholars say the KR documented each of the 16,000 people whom they tortured and executed, often on Pol Pot's direct orders.

In fact, admissions he makes in the interview link Pol Pot directly to Tuol Sleng. He acknowledges that he ordered the arrest and murder of political enemies, accusing them of collusion with Vietnam. These included Vorn Vet, Hu Num, and Hu Yuon, fellow standing committee members killed after the KR took power. "Those people were in the central leadership of Democratic Kampuchea, but they were not the people of Democratic Kampuchea," he says. "In 1976... that group of people you were talking about, they set up a coup d'etat committee, especially against me. In that committee there were Vietnamese agents in the majority." He names "Comrade Ya" - the nom de guerre of Men San, who commanded the northeast region - as chief conspirator.

KR documents obtained by the Post show that Ya was tortured to death on Pol Pot's orders at the Phnom Penh prison. In a handwritten September 1976 note accompanying a "confession" extracted from Ya under torture, notorious Tuol Sleng chief Duch writes that he "reported this morning at 0910 to the Organization about Ya." The Organization is how Pol Pot was officially known.

"The Organization decided that if this guy continues stubbornly to hide his traitorous linkages and activities, that he should be executed and not allowed to play games any more ... Therefore, with this Ya you can forcefully use the hot method and for prolonged periods, even if you slip and it kills him." The document ends with a chilling addendum: "Ya to read so that he can think it over carefully."

Pol Pot demonstrated that same willingness to turn on his closest comrades 21 years later, when he ordered the killing of Son Sen, his longtime defense minister. In a soft monotone that contrasts starkly with the subject matter, he tried to justify the murder, saying that he had discovered proof that Son Sen was conspiring against him. The principle evidence? "The brother of Son Sen, Son Chhum... even let his daughter marry people who worked with Hun Sen. So the connection has been established." Pol Pot's paranoia may have helped him survive as a guerrilla fighter, but it ultimately led his movement to self-destruct, fracturing into rival factions. It's a process that began soon after the group took power, and resumed with new intensity in mid-1996. As a result, separate KR groups are now scattered throughout the country, many of them aligned with Funcinpec or the CPP - whose premier, Hun Sen, himself defected from the KR in 1978.

"Pol Pot's stance got even loftier, and our territory got even smaller," says an elderly Anlong Veng villager. "He saw enemies as rotten flesh, swollen flesh. He saw enemies surrounding. Enemies in front, enemies behind, enemies to the north, enemies to the south... leaving us no place to breathe." Indeed, only six of the original 22 members of the Democratic Kampuchea party central committee survived their years in power unscathed, according to documents obtained from Tuol Sleng. The rest died, or survived only because they were rescued from Tuol Sleng, ironically, by the invading Vietnamese army.

After that, the KR rose from the ashes, with military or political support from China, Asean and Western powers opposed to Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia. They capitalized on the animosity towards Vietnam that permeates Cambodian society.

But since the 1993 UN-run elections, which the KR boycotted, the movement's cannibalization has resumed. Of the nine younger military commanders chosen in 1985 to form the new generation of leadership, six have defected to the Cambodian government and two were arrested for killing Son Sen. In August 1996, senior leader Ieng Sary and more than half of the KR fighters in the northwest broke with Pol Pot, Son Sen, Ta Mok and Khieu Samphan, rallying around the town of Pailin.

While Khieu Samphan is officially head of the KR remnant in Anlong Veng, Ta Mok is clearly the strongman. In fact, Khieu Samphan seems to retain sympathy for Pol Pot. On June 12, in a clandestine radio broadcast, he called Son Sen a "traitor." Asked if he was a hostage of Pol Pot when he made that broadcast, Samphan replies unconvincingly: "You could call it something like that." He refuses to elaborate.

The turmoil has shaken the movement to its core. "All of us - our parents, our children - are poor peasants. We agreed to abandon everything for many years to join the struggle," says Khem Nuon, Ta Mok's chief-of-staff. "And ultimately, in order to kill each other? How can that be?"

So has the KR movement truly turned on its master, Pol Pot? Certainly Ta Mok says so: "Pol Pot's hands are filled with blood." And from Pol Pot's own words, the answer also seems yes. "For me it is over. Over politically, and over as a human being."

Since his sentencing, Pol Pot says he has been confined to a wood-and-thatch hut, where he's virtually bedridden and sometimes on oxygen. When he discusses his health problems he becomes animated, a contrast to the implacable way he discussed those who died under his rule. "You look at me from the outside, you don't know what I have suffered. If you allow me, I would like to tell you about my sickness.

"One night around 2 a.m. I woke up to go to the bathroom," he says, describing an apparent stroke he suffered in late 1995. "My left eye was closed. I thought that maybe nothing was wrong. But when I came back my eye just did not work any more... Now my left side from my head to my toe does not work. And my left eye is 95 percent blind. That is why when I walk it is not normal."

As the interview nears its second hour, Pol Pot often licks his parched lips and sips from his glass of water. Sometimes he becomes annoyed when he is interrupted or his answers are challenged. But he never raises his voice. And he seems eager to elicit sympathy. "In Khmer we have a saying that when one is both quite sick and old there remains only one thing, that you die."

Pol Pot says his days are bleak. His books have been confiscated, and he rarely gets out of bed. "I have nothing to do now," he says, adding that the hut is plagued with mosquitoes.

He listens to the radio every morning: both the clandestine Democratic Kampuchea radio and the Voice of America. "I want to listen to VOA every night as well, but sometimes I fall asleep," he says, complaining that the morning broadcast isn't as interesting as the evening one.

"I feel a little bit bored, but I have become used to that. You know, I can't even play with my daughter or my wife any more because in the morning, even after I wake up, I can't get out of bed. I stay still while my wife occupies herself with gardening and sewing. My daughter gathers wood and works in the kitchen. But we are together for dinner... We dine together at a small table."

He speaks with fatherly affection of his only child, aged 12. "She is a good daughter, a good person. She gets along with the others quite well. "But he says she isn't doing as well in some school subjects as others. On that score, "she is like me." When she grows up, will she be proud to say she is the daughter of Pol Pot? "I don't know about that. It's up to history to judge," he responds.

Then Pol Pot, with an engaging smile, apologizes and says he needs to go back to the hut and lie down. "I feel very, very tired," he says.

He is helped to his feet, unable to rise on his own. As he's assisted down the steps and along the jungle path, he pauses to offer pleasantries to hovering cadres, who remain grim-faced. Then he raises his hands together again in a polite farewell. Before climbing back into the truck, he turns to one of his captors and says softly: "I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country."

On the Stand

By Nate Thayer in Anlong Veng

Far Eastern Economic Review

October 30, 1997

There are good reasons to be worried when coming face-to-face with the man responsible for one of the worst mass murders in history. But Nate Thayer was most worries that Pol Pot wouldn’t talk, or would cut off the interview after a few minutes. So from the outset he hit Pol Pot with the big question: Does he admit guilt for his murderous 1975-78 rule? It was a question that Thayer pressed again and again. Because Pol Pot is more likely to die than be turned over to an international tribunal, the jungle interview may be as close to a courtroom as he ever gets.

Thayer’s interpreter, a senior Khmer Rouge cadre, tried to beg out of his translating duties, perhaps anticipating the tone of the questions. Thayer speaks conversational Khmer, but he prevailed upon the interpreter to translate both the questions and answers while a tape recorder and television camera rolled. Here are excerpts, starting with Thayer’s opening questions.

Q Nate Thayer: He knows he is accused of leading and organization that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and that he has been condemned by most of the world for it. Is he a mass murderer, or what has he contributed to his country?

A Pol Pot:I think that you can raise all of the questions at one time, and some questions I think that I can answer connecting one to another to simplify things. But it's up to you...

Q: I'm interested in the issues of the time he was in power between 1975 and 1979. The millions of people who indeed did suffer during that time, and whether he feels that he's fairly accused. That's one question, let's start with.

A: Yes, I want to reply. Your question is not unfamiliar. That question has been raised time and again: I would like to say first that my conscience is clear. Everything I have done and contributed is first for the nation and the people and the race of Cambodia.

[Pol Pot then spoke about how the Vietnamese wanted to take over Cambodia, adding "they wanted to assassinate me because they knew without me they could easily swallow up Cambodia".]

Q:I would like to hear all of that, and if he's willing to stay here for hours, I am too. But if we could please deal with this first. As you know, most of the world thinks that you're responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Cambodians who didn't deserve to suffer. Could you answer that question directly? Do you feel that you were indeed responsible for crimes against humanity, against your own people?

A:I'm going to reply. I want to tell you clearly. First, I would like to tell you that I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people. Even now, and you can look at me, am I savage person? My conscience is clear... As I told you before, they fought against us, so we had to take measures to defend ourselves...

Q: You have an opportunity here, a historical opportunity. You know well that during your years in power, your policies - agrarian experiments, social and political organizations, the direct executions of many thousands of people - that many families suffered. The country itself also suffered because of your policies. Your fellow Cambodians want to know whether you feel any remorse, whether you acknowledge that you made very serious mistakes while you were in power?

A: There are two sides to it, as I told you: There's what we did wrong, and what we did right. The mistake is that we did some things against the people - by us and also by the enemy - but the other side, as I told you, is that without our struggle there would be no Cambodia right now.

Q: But for all those hundreds of thousands who suffered - not just died but suffered from forced labor, from lack of food, from what were clearly failed central policies while you were in power - don't you think that they deserve an apology?

A: For the wrong things of our struggle, as I told you, for the wrong things, it has been written in the book. This is a testimony before history.

Q:Which book?

A: The book is the "The Right and Wrong of Democratic Kampuchea". [Pol Pot was apparently referring to a political tract released by the Democratic Kampuchea movement, as the Khmer Rouge calls themselves, in the late 1980s.]

Q: But that acknowledged only 30,000 deaths. All independent scholars, from all political ideologies, acknowledge a minimum of hundreds of thousands of people who died as a result of failed central policies while you were in power...That is a fact. While you were in sole power-and all the other members of your standing committee say you were in full power-thousands of people died because of failed social policies of your government. Are you willing to acknowledge that fact?

A:As I told you, that was written in the book, and I'm tired of talking about it...

Q: Let's talk about Tuol Sleng. There is overwhelming evidence that you had overall responsibility for Tuol Sleng. Sixteen thousand people who signed confessions were executed, including women and children who were suspected CIA, KGB, Vietnamese agents. Were you responsible for Toul Sleng and do you really believe that those 16,000 - including women and children - were agents of a foreign government?

A: I was at the top. I made only big decisions on big issues. I want to tell you - Tuol Sleng was a Vietnamese exhibition; a journalist wrote that. People talk about Tuol Sleng, Tuol Sleng, Toul Sleng, but when we look at the pictures, the pictures are the same. When I first heard about Tuol Sleng, it was on VOA [Voice of America]. I listened twice. And there are documents talking about someone who did research about the skeletons of the people... They said when you look closely at the skulls, they are smaller than the skulls of the Khmer people.

Q: Are you saying that you never heard of Tuol Sleng before 1979?

A: No, I never heard of it. And those two researchers, they said that those skeletons, they were more than 10 years old.

Q:Sir, let me say that there is overwhelming scientific evidence, overwhelming proof that thousands of people, Cambodians, were executed at Toul Sleng while you were in control of Phnom Penh. There is no dispute among anybody else in the world outside of Anlong Veng, perhaps, that it is true.

A:[No response.]

Forbidden City: New strongman Ta Mok Reaches out of isolation

By Nate Thayer in Anlong Veng

Far Eastern Economic Review

October 30, 1997

TA MOK, the one-legged Khmer Rouge general known to the outside world as "the butcher," smiles and chuckles warmly as he welcomes the first journalist he has ever met.

During a three-hour interview over a luncheon of fish and Pringles potato chips specially imported for the occasion, the man who overthrew Pol Pot speaks with a peasant's directness and the ease of a man in total control.

His words, though, are sometimes as chilling as his laugh is warm. In an unprecedented admission by a KR leader, he says "hundreds of thousands" died during the revolutionary regime's 1975-78 rule, though he blames their deaths on Pol Pot.

As for the thousands of fellow KR that his forces killed during the purges of 1978, he shrugs. Their leader, he explains, had been discovered to be Vietnamese.

The new KR strongman can seem a study in contradictions. He has earned a fearsome reputation as a military chief, but in person he comes across as grandfatherly. He is clearly revered by many of the approximately 60,000 people living under his control around Anlong Veng. It's and area almost completely isolated by mountains and dense, land-mine-strewn jungles, but Mok's development projects seem to have turned it into one of the more prosperous swaths of countryside in Cambodia. But for Mok, 71, there's no contradiction. He's a peasant leader who defends what he sees as the interests of his people. And like Pol Pot, that includes an obsession with the perceived threat of Vietnamese domination. Mok would kill a Vietnamese intruder with the nonchalance with which a farmer plucks a leech off a bare leg.

Mok believes that what his people need now is international support for their guerrilla war against Premier Hun Sen. To that end, he has agreed to an unprecedented interview. Sitting in a wooden pavilion freshly painted with revolutionary slogans, he talks about supporting "liberal democracy." It's not clear if he really understands the term, but since he ousted Pol Pot in June, cadres say he has allowed new freedoms in the guerrilla zone.

The potential benefits of world acceptance are plainly evident form the hard-packed dirt logging road that snakes down the Dongrek escarpment from Thailand to Anlong Veng. Millions of dollars' worth of logs lie by the roadside, blocked from going anywhere by an international agreement that bars the export of timber without central government permission.

That permission isn't about to come: The central government is at war with the KR. Evidence of past battles is everywhere: The few concrete buildings in Anlong Veng are pockmarked by bullets and shrapnel, and government tanks disabled during intense fighting two years ago sprawl in the roadway, political graffiti now adorning their turrets.

Yet Anlong Veng is more than a battlefield. A two-day tour shows a wealth of agricultural projects, making it one of the more developed rural areas in Cambodia. Sophisticated dams, irrigating systems and other water projects are everywhere. Tractors and earth-moving vehicles imported through Thailand work the land.

Water spills over new concrete dams into rivers where dozens of villagers, many missing limbs from mines, haul in large fish with nets.

"The people here love grandfather because he cares very much about the well-being of the poor," says Noun Nov, a cadre in his 40s. Like many others in Anlong Veng, Nov has followed Mok since his mid-teens.

Indeed, Mok says it was his passion for rural development projects ("My hobby is agriculture") that cost him his leg. He stepped on a mine when building a road. "I was inspecting a road project. I was behind a bulldozer," he recalls, shifting his artificial limb.

Is this the one place where the KR's ideology, which caused the death of perhaps one million Cambodians in the 1970s, actually works? Hardly. Mok denies that he ever embraced communism. "I was a monk," he says, and when he was just 16 he was recruited into the resistance. "When I joined the Communist Party of Cambodia, I did not know what communism was," he says with a burst of laugher. "They told me the party is a patriotic one. That is why I joined the party. Later on I found that the Communist Party was sucking the blood of the people.

"When we talk about economic life, I have no theoretical ideology," says Mok. " What is policy? When we talk about life we talk about land and water. For the people, having these is having freedom and democracy."

Actually, KR cadres say Mok has introduced new freedoms in Anlong Veng in the four months since he ousted Pol Pot. Previously, there were no schools, while now scores of brightly dressed schoolchildren carrying notebooks can be seen casually returning home from lessons. Listening to radio other than the clandestine guerrilla station was forbidden; now they can listen freely to foreign broadcasts. "We can even watch TV," one cadre exclaims proudly.

Ironically, there are signs that opening up has spawned social problems the puritanical KR never faced before. Mok has responded in a characteristically KR way: "No Gambling" has been added to revolutionary slogans such as "Defeat for the Contemptible Yuon Enemy Aggressors" adorning the walls of Anlong Veng.

That's not the only new slogan. "Defeat for the Traitor Pol Pot Whose Hands Are Stained With Blood," "Long Live the Emerging Democracy," and "Cambodians Don't Kill Cambodians" are all freshly painted. Mok, who has basically spent his entire life in the jungle, seems to think the appearance of the new slogans will be enough to inspire Cambodians to rally in support of is movement.

"Reports reach me everyday saying that the new policy that 'Cambodians Don't Kill Cambodians' is a magic slogan indeed," he says.

Of course, killing Cambodians was exactly what the KR did during their years when Mok was at the very core of the leadership. Mok denies personal culpability for the mass murder of those years - a denial that scholars say is patently untrue. But in an unprecedented admission by a senior KR leader, he does admit that the regime committed wide-scale abuses.

"It is clear that Pol Pot has committed crimes against humanity," he says. "I don't agree with the American figure that millions died, but hundreds of thousands, yes."

Mok's venom for Pol Pot seems genuine and personal. Yet his denials of personal responsibility ring false, scholars say. For example, he claims no involvement in the Tuol Sleng prison. "Pol Pot alone was in charge of the prison," he insists.

Academics who are analyzing documents seized at Tuol Sleng, including 16,000 signed "confessions" of people who were tortured and executed there, say there's no doubt that Mok both ordered arrests and viewed " confessions". "His fingerprints are all over the place. The proof is irrefutable," says Stephen Heder, a professor at the University of London.

Mok's "butcher" nickname may have been earned in 1978. As commander of the southwestern zone of Cambodia and fifth-ranking party leader, he was ordered by Pol Pot to purge KR cadres from the eastern zone who were accused of conspiring with Vietnam. Zone commander Sao Phim and thousands of his loyalists were killed.

Asked about this brutal purge, Mok makes clear that he believes anyone associated with the Vietnamese is a fair target for murder. "I learned from documents produced by Pol Pot that Sao Phim was Vietnamese," he says of the fourth-ranking party leader.

Mok shrugs again in reference to two other leaders, Hu Num and Hu Yuon, who were killed under torture. "Sao Phim I can understand. This man was Vietnamese," he says, but he then adds that the deaths of "Hu Nim and Hu Yuon I do not understand."

Mok's virulent anti-Vietnamese statements come as no surprise. In 1993, his troops carried out numerous massacres of Vietnamese. "I have never taken a nap in my life, in order to go faster than the Vietnamese, to beat the Vietnamese, to not allow the Vietnamese to attack us," he says. He considers anyone working with Hun Sen or the CPP to be Vietnamese and thus a legitimate target for murder. That may explain why the straight-talking guerrilla chief seems to feel no guilt for his role in the horrors of 1975-78. Asked about the deaths of those years, he laughs and waves his hand dismissively. "If my hands were stained with the blood of my compatriots, why would the people love me? Go ask them yourself."

Mok says that if he had the chance to live life differently, he would not have joined with Pol Pot, whose "hands are soiled with blood".

Yet his rejection of the long-time KR supremo seems rooted not in the crimes of the 1970s but those on June 1997, when Pol Pot ordered the killing of Son Sen and attempted to murder Mok in a power struggle.

Since the 1993 UN-sponsored elections, the KR had been fracturing, and Pol Pot had moved his base of operations, first from Trat in the southwest, to Pailin, then to Phnom Chhat in the northwest, Mok says. "From Phnom Chhat he came to ask me to stay here. Then....he tried to kill me and the people of Anlong Veng. How can I trust him?"

After nearly three hours talking about the revolutionary movement that has been his world for more than half a century, Mok says Pol Pot has been taken to a mountainside location and is waiting to be interviewed. "Ask Pol Pot whether he recognizes his faults. Ask him why he has assassinated his fellow Cambodians. After all that he has done, what more does he want?" Mok says, scoffing at the man he served for decades. He then asks the interviewer: "Can you still say that Pol Pot and I are not estranged?"

My Education: How Saloth Sar became Pol Pot

By Nate Thayer in Anlong Veng

Far Eastern Economic Review

October 30, 1997

The bones stacked in the Killing fields dotting Cambodia testify to the results of Pol Pot's 1975-1978 experiment in radical agrarian reform. Until now, however, the ideology that drove it has been left largely to the realm of speculation. Some scholars have described Pol Pot as a Cultural Revolution-style Maoist, while others have conjectured that a youthful grape-picking trip to Tito's Yugoslavia planted the seeds for his later break with the mainstream Marxists of the Soviet Union and Vietnam.

But Pol Pot tells his own story differently. He claims that as a student in France in 1949-53, he was influenced by a range of progressive movements-including, ironically, that of non-violent Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi.

In his first interview with a foreign journalist in 18 years, Pol Pot may have refused to repent for the horror of his rule, but he was clearly concerned with what the history books say about his personal life. He became animated in talking about his youth and family, after remaining impassive during questioning about the abuses of his rule.

Historians haven't even been able to agree on the ultra-secretive Pol Pot's birthday: Some say May 25, 1925, while others put it on the same day in 1927. Pol Pot said neither was correct: He was born in January 1925. "January-I remember, because my mother wrote it in chalk on the wall of the house, next to the cupboard," he said in Khmer, adding "janvier" in French to make sure there was no mistake. He had lied about his age, he said, to remain eligible for a scholarship.

Born Saloth Sar in Kampong Thom province, he attended secondary school in Phnom Penh and won a scholarship to France in 1949. Clearly defensive of his status as an "intellectual," Pol Pot volunteered that biographer David Chandler was "not entirely accurate" when characterizing him as a poor student. "I was not a bad student. I was average . . . I studied just enough to keep my scholarship. The rest of the time I just read books," he said.

It was those books, as well as the leftist student movements brewing in Europe in the years after World War II, that gave Pol Pot his early political education. "I looked at the second-hand books that were on sale along the Seine River, the old books that I loved to read," he recalled. "When I got money from my scholarship, I had to spend it on rent and food, so I only had 20 or 25 francs left to spend.

But I got a lot of books to read. For example, La Grande Revolution Francaise. I did not understand it all, but I just read. At the same time I saw the movement in India of Mahatma Gandhi. He was well known and I was very pleased with that. And later on Nehru.

"I started as a nationalist and then patriot and then I read progressive books. Before that time, I never read L'Humanite [the French communist party newspaper]. It scared me, " he smiled, "But I got used to it because of the student movement."

Pol Pot said there was nothing political about his trip or trips to Yugoslavia in the early 1950s. "I went to Yugoslavia because it was vacation time and I had no money. They organized a brigade... I paid just 2,000 francs, including everything. It wasn't influenced by any ideology. We just went for pleasure.

The next year . . . I went camping. So I cannot tell you of any single influence. Maybe it's a little from here, a little from there."

Pol Pot said his real political awakening, though, came upon his return home to Cambodia. "Before I went to France, my relatives, they lived comfortably. They were middle peasants. When I came back, I went to my village by bus. When I got off the bus, I met someone with a wagon. He asked my name and he said: 'Ah- you've come back!' And I look at him and see he's my uncle. And he asks me 'Do you want to go home?' I was shocked. Before he had a piece of land and a buffalo, now he had become a rickshaw-puller... I met and talked with the relatives who used to have land and buffaloes and had nothing now... What influenced me most was the actual situation in Cambodia."

The secrecy that made the Khmer Rouge so effective was, Pol Pot said, second nature to him. "Since my boyhood, I never talked about myself ... That was my nature. I was taciturn ... I'm quite modest. I don't want to tell people that I'm a leader ... I didn't tell anybody, not my brother, not my sister, because I didn't want to worry them. If anything happened to me, I didn't want them to have any connection to it. So some people think that I don't care about them. But on the contrary, I respect, I love my relatives. But I never revealed my political thinking to them."

Pol Pot said that it was as much "by chance" as anything that he became leader of the Cambodian communist party in 1960, when Tou Samouth disappeared. "There was nobody else to become secretary of the party, so I had to take charge," he said.

He vehemently denied that he had killed his "best friend", explaining in detail how Tou Samouth had been betrayed and arrested when he left his safe house in Phnom Penh to fetch medicine for his sick child. Tou Samouth was taken to the house of Lon Nol - the military commander who would later lead Cambodia- and interrogated for a week, Pol Pot said. "At that time I was his aide. If Tou Samouth had talked, I would have been arrested. He was killed at Stung Meanchey pagoda. We loved each other."

November 11, 2011

POL POT: THE END

By Nate Thayer

In a stunning journalistic achievement, REVIEW correspondent Nate Thayer comes face-to-face with the elusive Pol Pot, architect of Cambodia’s killing fields. In a story packed with exclusive photos, Thayer describes Pol Pot’s jungle “trial,” and reveals the turmoil within the Khmer Rouge. Separate stories profile Pol Pot, introduce the new Khmer Rouge leadership, and shed new light on Cambodia’s deadly July coup and the suspected drug baron who financed it.

BROTHER NUMBER ZERO

On Other Pages:

19: Pol Pot Unmasked

21: New Face of the Khmer Rouge

22: Casualties of Hun Sen’s Coup

23: The Money Man Behind the Coup

24: On History’s Front Line

Pol Pot caused the deaths of more than a million Cambodians. But when he turned on his longtime military commander, Ta Mok, that was one Cambodian too many

By Nate Thayer in Anlong Veng, Cambodia

After a series of furtive rendezvous, using coded messages over mobile phones, I slipped into one of the most impenetrable, malarial-ridden and landmine-strewn jungles of the world: Khmer Rouge-controlled northern Cambodia. I was hoping to interview Pol Pot, one of the century’s most notorious and elusive mass murderers.

What I did not fathom, as I entered the Khmer Rouge stronghold of Anlong Veng at 12:12 p.m. on July 25, was that I was about to witness nothing less than history.

“Long live! Long live! Long live the new strategy!” hundreds of voices chanted in unison. The clenched fists of the crowds pumped toward the sky, as a smiling middle-aged Khmer Rouge cadre led me toward an open-air mass meeting hall. Old artillery pieces and a captured Russian tank stood nearby.

“Crush! Crush! Crush! Pol Pot and his clique!” shouted the crowd on cue as we approached, their fists striking down towards the ground.

There, slumped in a simple wooden chair, grasping a long bamboo cane and a rattan fan, an anguished old man, frail and struggling to maintain his dignity, was watching his life vision crumble in utter, final defeat.

This was how the “people’s tribunal’ began for Pol Pot, reviled around the world for personally orchestrating a reign of terror that left more than a million human beings dead and shattered the lives of many millions more.

The crude podium held a microphone, and crackling loudspeakers—powered by a car battery lying on the earthen floor—began to spew humiliating public denunciations of the long-time Khmer Rouge leader.

A shocking number of participants stood on crude wooden stumps, sat in home-made wheelchairs, or were missing eyes—sacrifices to the revolutionary cause of Pol Pot. Others, their arms blown off by landmines, were unable to join the frequent clapping as speaker after speaker denounced the man once venerated as “Brother Number One.”

“Our ultimate goal today is that the international community should understand that we are no longer Khmer Rouge and we are not Pol Potists!,” roared Ta Neou, the governor of the approximately 60,000 civilians who live in the area, which was under Pol Pot’s control until weeks ago.

The carefully orchestrated performance evoked the image of a grainy, black-and-white film clip from China’s Cultural Revolution. But the message was starkly different. “Long live the emergence of the democracy movement!” shouted individuals in the crowd, periodically interrupting leaders offering carefully crafted speeches at the microphone. A chorus would repeat the slogan, followed by prolonged applause by the roughly 500 participants. “Crush! Crush! Crush! Pol Pot and his murderous clique!”

Pol Pot sat alone, near three other manacled loyalists. Many in the crowd of women, children, and uniformed guerrillas seemed more interested at gazing at the first Westerner they had ever seen than in watching the traumatized old man sitting alone in a chair.

Each speaker, seemingly chosen to represent a sector of society—a farmer, an intellectual, a soldier, a woman—got up to denounce and humiliate Pol Pot “and his clique.”

Pol Pot often seemed close to tears as the vitriol was unleashed. In contrast, three younger army commanders put on trial alongside him had menacing, almost arrogant expressions, staring coldly into the eyes of the speakers, the crowd and the visiting reporter.

“We have sacrificed everything for the sake of the movement,” Ta Neou continued, “Our parents and all of us are children of peasants and farmers, we have sacrificed everything for the sake of the movement, but at the end we kill each other.”

Pol Pot, who ruled Cambodia for more than three years and ruled the Khmer Rouge for more than three decades, is genuinely finished. He has been denounced and imprisoned by his own movement. Not for the 1975-1978 Cambodian genocide, but for turning on his own comrades in an attempted purge in June, according to speakers at his trial.

Those commanders, led by longtime military commander Ta Mok, struck back and took Pol Pot prisoner after the purge failed. The tribunal sentenced Pol Pot to life imprisonment, but ruled out turning him over to international courts, where he could face charges of crimes against humanity.

The Khmer Rouge of Anlong Veng have good reason to try and distance themselves from the notorious Pol Pot. They want to attract international support for their struggle to unseat Cambodian premier Hun Sen. That is why they let a foreign reporter witness the show trial, the first time a journalist had entered Anlong Veng and left alive.

Yet lengthy interviews with Khmer Rouge cadre left little doubt that his ouster was authentic. Still, the cadres clearly saw it as a tragedy, and continued to treat the 72-year-old Pol Pot with Gentle respect.

The fall of Pol Pot underlines the view that the Khmer Rouge movement that ruled Cambodia in the 1970’s essentially no longer exists. The original leaders have largely been replaced by younger ones less steeped in communist ideology, and the movement has fractured into numerous factions, many of whom are allied with the mainstream political parties contesting power in Phnom Penh.

“It no longer makes any sense whatsoever to call whatever remains a Khmer Rouge movement,” says Stephen Heder, a Cambodian Scholar at the University of London’s School of Advanced International Studies. “Because of the realignment of forces over the last several years, the concept of a Khmer Rouge movement as we know it no longer has any meaning.”

But that doesn’t mean the Khmer Rouge have become irrelevant in Cambodia. The aggressive courting of Khmer Rouge factions by Cambodia’s rival premiers, Hun Sen and Prince Norodom Ranariddh, was central to the July 5-6 coup in Phnom Penh. In fact, the REVIEW has learned, the Khmer Rouge finalized their alliance with Ranariddh’s Funcinpec party on July 4. Worried that the balance of power would be tipped in his rival’s favour, Hun Sen ousted Ranariddh the next day.

Photo: Nate Thayer

Pol Pot also opposed those negotiations, and it led to his downfall, according to Khmer Rouge cadre interviewed in Anlong Veng. Virtually the entire leadership favoured a political deal with the royalist Funcinpec, but Pol Pot was opposed, said Gen. Khmer Nuon, who is now the Khmer Rouge’s army chief of staff.

“Domestically and internationally, Pol Pot has his own personal problems to take care of,” Khem Nuon said, referring to Pol Pot’s blood-soaked reputation. “He has no way out. That is why he keeps dragging this movement toward the darkness.”

The visit to Anlong Veng opened an unprecedented window into the inner workings of one of the world’s most secretive guerrilla movements. The Khmer Rouge have splintered dramatically since July 1996, when forces in western Cambodia, representing almost half the movement, broke with Pol Pot’s northern forces headquartered at Anlong Veng. The western split was headed by Ieng Sary, Pol Pot’s brother-in-law and longtime comrade-in-arms.

Khem Nuon said the western split was aimed against Pol Pot himself, but the 72-year-old leader blamed his top leaders—Ta Mok, Nuon Chea, and Son Sen—for losing the west by failing to heal the rift. “ So Pol Pot asked Mao—over there,” Khem Nuon explained, pointing to a young Khmer Rouge cadre standing listening to the interview,” to shoot Ta Mok and burn him—last October—to leave no evidence.”

The grim-faced young cadre, who looked capable of such a deed, nodded in agreement with his commander. But he didn’t carry out Pol Pot’s order. Because Ta Mok, who is known to the outside world as “The Butcher,” is immensely popular with the troops and civilians under his control. So Much so, Khem Nuon said, that Pol Pot saw him as a threat. “All the combatants here are under Ta Mok and they really like him a lot because he is so helpful to them in terms of standard of living. He built roads, bridges, dams within this area,” Khem Nuon said. “This is the reason Pol Pot wanted to get rid of Ta Mok.”

Pol Pot turned to two senior military field commanders, Gen. Sarouen and Gen. San, and attempted to consolidate power against Ta Mok. He called a mass meeting on February 25 of this year, and had them declared the new political and military leaders, replacing Ta Mok, Khem Nuon said. “What is the main cause that steered our people to rise up against Pol Pot? One, the leadership and the grip on power by Pol Pot was so long. All the power was within his hands,” Khem Nuon said. “Pol pot took decisions without even consulting the top leadership.”

About the same time, according to Cambodian government sources and diplomats, secret negotiations accelerated between envoys of Prince Ranariddh and elements of the Khmer Rouge in Anlong Veng. Most of these efforts were conducted by Ta Mok loyalists—often behind Pol Pot’s back—and the top royalist military commander, Gen. Nyek Bun Chhay. By May, the faction agreed in principle to join in alliance.

Increasingly isolated, Pol Pot launched a desperate attempt on June 9 to scuttle the peace deal by purging Ta Mok and other top leaders. That night, longtime defence minister Son Sen and 14 of his relatives, including a five-year-old child, were shot dead by Sarouen’s men, according to both Khmer Rouge and intelligence sources. “On the 9th of June at 12:15 a.m., Pol Pot issued a direct order to take two Toyota pick-up trucks loaded with 20-30 soldiers to kill Mr. Son Sen,” said Khem Nuon.

The killings sparked several days of turmoil, with commanders fleeing into the jungle in disarray. But they rallied behind Ta Mok and trapped Pol Pot and his band of 300 remaining supporters on June 15, Khem Nuon said. Four days later, they had surrendered.

With Pol Pot neutralized, the remaining Khmer Rouge leadership moved rapidly forward to finalize a secret, tactical, political and military alliance with Ranariddh’s political faction. The two factions were allies against Hun Sen’s Phnom Penh government in a decade-long guerrilla war before Cambodia’s 1991 peace treaty.

The deal was closed July 4 in Anlong Veng. Hun Sen, learning about Funcinpec’s new alliance through his agents, launched his deadly coup the next morning, according to Cambodian political cadres and Asian intelligence sources. It has tipped Cambodia, which enjoyed four years of relative peace after 1993 United nations-sponsored elections, back into the throes of the warfare that seems to define this nation of 10 million people.

Hun Sen has claimed the entire tribunal was stage-managed by Pol Pot himself. Khem Nuon paints a very different picture, but he did say that Pol Pot had ‘consented’ to having a foreign reporter witness the mass meeting, as a way of acknowledging his guilt for moving against his comrades.

“ Pol Pot did himself confess to me clearly, after his arrest,” Khem Nuon said. “ When I met him the first time, he embraced me and burst into tears and said: ‘It is the right thing comrade that this has happened,’ and then he cried. It was on June 21, 1997, and he told me: ‘I am wrong, comrade, all the mistakes were made by me, alone,’ and then he cried.”

“ Pol Pot told me that this is the end of his life, he has nothing left, but he begged me to allow him to live,” Khem Nuon continued. “ I also want to make clear that if Pol Pot was vested with any credibility or respect, he would not have shown up and let you see him like you just did today.”

: I told him this morning that you were going to be here,” to witness his condemnation, Khem Nuon told the REVIEW. “ I told him that we want to prove to the world that we no longer want to associate ourselves with him. Then he consented.”

As the “People’s Tribunal of Anlong Veng” continued into its second hour, the new leaders somberly paced on the outskirts of the crowd, concerned by the deteriorating health of a now clearly weak and traumatized Pol Pot. Guerrilla officials acknowledged that Pol Pot suffered from serious heart disease and high blood pressure long before the events of recent days.

Khem Nuon said relatives and friends of those killed on June 9-10 wanted the blood of Pol Pot and his co-defendants San, Khon, and Sarouen—said to have carried out the murders on his orders. “ You notice that here today nobody was allowed to carry a weapon to this meeting, otherwise they would have been killed by the mob already,” Khem Nuon said.

But the cadre who overthrew Pol Pot seemed anguished as they watched the white-haired old man, who was dressed in loose cotton clothes with a blue-and-white Cambodian scarf looped around his neck. Confusion and sadness were etched on men who had spent their entire adult lives following Pol Pot from Cambodia’s jungles to its capital and back again.

“ We have put an end to the leadership which has betrayed our organization and the people,” Mak Ben, a bespectacled French-educated economist, dressed in a green Chinese-style military uniform, said from the podium. “ They are completely gone, as of right now, the Pol Pot regime has ended.”

“ Having acknowledged the betrayal of our group in recent months by Pol Pot and his clique,” the loudspeaker roared into the nearby forest, then Pol Pot’s crimes were read out. They included the murder of Son Sen, the attempted murder and ‘detention’ of Ta Mok and Nuon Chea, and “destroying the policy of national reconciliation,” a reference to the attempt to block the Funcinpec deal.

“These are the criminal acts—the betrayal by Pol Pot and his clique—against the people, the armed forces, and our cadre. In conclusion, we all decide to condemn and sentence this clique to life imprisonment.”

He immediately was helped up, unable to walk unassisted, by a guard in Chinese-style military fatigues. “ get someone under his other arm, get him more help,” Khem Nuon ordered. Patting his heart, Khem Nuon added: “ I am worried that he may die from the stress.”

Some people respectfully bowed, as if to royalty, as Pol Pot walked 25 meters to a waiting vehicle. “ I said what I said with a very heavy heart,” said Tep Kunnal, an emerging political leader, as he walked slowly away with his head bowed after denouncing Pol Pot. “ It is very, very difficult for me, but it had to be done. Before there were two dangers for Cambodia. Pol Pot and the Vietnamese puppet Hun Sen. Now there is only one.”

The cadres suggested that I ask Pol Pot questions while he was led away, but balked at translating when told the questions I wanted to pose. “ I cannot ask such a question to the leaders. You must ask them in Khmer yourself. It is better.”

Pol Pot, perhaps never to be seen alive again, was helped into a Toyota Landcruiser with tinted windows—captured booty from UN peacekeeping soldiers prior to the 1993 elections. Seconds after the trial ended, a torrential rain began.

POL POT: THE END

COVER STORY

POL POT UNMASKED: He was obsessed with secrecy and total control

By Nate Thayer in Bangkok, Thailand

Far Eastern Economic Review

August 7, 1997

Pol Pot, whose name is synonymous with the Cambodian genocide, exercized total control over the Khmer Rouge for more than three decades from behind a wall of impenetrable secrecy.

By putting him on trial, his former comrades-in-arms have unmasked a man who shunned exposure, even when he was premier of Cambodia. They have also broken the vice-like grip on the movement he retained through a combination of charisma and utter ruthlessness.

Born to a peasant family in Kampong Thom on May 18t, 1925, Saloth Sar—Pol Pot’s real name—was educated at a Buddhist monastery before entering technical school in Phnom Penh. His clandestine life began in his teens, when he joined the anti-French resistance movement in Indochina during World War ll. By 1946, he was a member of the underground Indochinese Communist Party.

In 1949, he won a scholarship to study radio electronics in Paris, where he was active in radical student politics. His studies, apparently, took a back seat and he failed his exams three years in a row. He spent one summer picking grapes in Tito’s Yugoslavia, where he may have acquired his radical communism that challenged Soviet-style orthodoxy.

It was also during his sojourn in France that he charmed Khieu Ponnary, whose sister was married to Ieng Sary, another future Khmer Rouge leader.

Returning to Phnom Penh with no degree, Pol Pot taught at a private secondary school and wrote articles for left-wing publications that he signed, “The Original Khmer.” His underground activities went farther than that, however. He became a senior member of the Cambodian Communist Party at its founding congress in 1960, and was named secretary in 1963 after the mysterious death of Tou Samouth.

It was then that his secret life became his whole life. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, no longer content to belittle the Cambodian communists as “me Khmer Rouges”—“My Red Khmers”—was stepping up police pressure. Pol Pot and his comrades fled into the jungle, leaving no trace. “When a secret is kept secret, 50% of the battle is won,” Pol Pot once said.

Twelve years later, after fighting first Sihanouk’s army and then American-backed troops of Gen. Lon Nol, the battle was won. On April 17, 1975, Pol Pot’s army of peasants, clad in simple black-cotton uniforms, marched into Phnom Penh. Finally, Pol Pot could put his ideas into action.

The result was one of the most brutal and disastrous social experiments in history. After emptying the capital at gunpoint, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge tried to transform Cambodia into a communal agrarian utopia, but instead turned the country into a vast slave-labour camp. More than one million Cambodians—out of a population of some 7 million—were executed, tortured, or starved to death under the Khmer Rouge reign of terror.

The educated were the first to be slain. But later, as the reign of terror turned on itself, waves of purges decimated the ranks of Khmer Rouge cadres. Anyone who could pose a threat to Pol Pot was killed.

Through it all, Pol Pot stayed behind his mask. When it was announced in 1976 that Pol Pot had been named premier of “Democratic Kampuchea,” as the country was renamed, American intelligence officials—who had been fighting the Khmer Rouge for years—could not figure out who he was.

“Secret work is fundamental,” Nuon Chea, the party’s number 2, told a visiting Danish delegation in 1977, the only time Nuon Chea was seen in public.

Nevertheless, a personality cult started to spring up around him in May 1978, pushed by cadres eager to show their loyalty as purges spiraled. Tens of thousands of Khmer Rouge cadres were executed as Pol Pot eliminated competition. His power was clearly growing, Chandler says: whereas he was addressed as ‘Elder Brother Pol” or “Brother Number One” soon after taking power, that gradually changed to “Uncle Secretary” or “party centre” to “Leading Apparatus” to, finally, the “High Organization.”

Pol Pot’s radical ideas were nourished by a five month sojourn in China in 1965-66, when the country was in ferment leading up to the Great proletarian Cultural Revolution. His admiration for the Gang of Four was mutual: Pol Pot went to China after his 1975 victory and met Mao Zedong, who congratulated him on his speedy revolution.

While Pol Pot’s thinking may have been influenced by his foreign experiences, at its root it is deeply Khmer. And in Pol Pot’s case, that means a visceral hatred of Vietnam, the much larger neighbor that seized the Mekong Delta from the medieval Khmer empire. Egged on by that HATRED, Khmer Rouge guerrillas carried out raids into southern Vietnam, triggering the December 1978 Vietnamese invasion.

Pol Pot again fled into the jungle, after ruling for three years, eight months, and 20 days. Reverting to form, he took the code name “81.” Until July 25, 1997, he hadn’t been seen by foreign journalists since 1979, when he was filmed by Naoki Mabuchi, a Japanese photographer with close ties to the Khmer Rouge.

Pol Pot officially retired from his official posts in 1985, but there was never any question that remained in total control of the movement. Cadres who have heard him speak say he is an amazing orator, making speeches so resonant in revolutionary and patriotic spirit that they bring his listeners to tears. Yet he refrained from appearing publicly.

Now, it appears Pol Pot has lost both his mask and his powers. That doesn’t auger well for the movement he helped found, and which is now in danger of segmenting further. As Nuon Chea said in his 1977 interview: “The leadership apparatus must be defended at any price…as long as the leadership is there, the party will not die.”

POL POT: THE END

COVER STORY

NEXT GENERATION: Khmer Rouge put on a new face

By Nate Thayer in Anlong Veng, Cambodia

Far Eastern Economic Review

August 7, 1997

A tiger, according to Gen. Khem Nuon, can indeed change its stripes. And if foreigners doubt that the Khmer Rouge movement has done just that, he said, they should come and see for themselves in the jungles of Northern Cambodia.

That is the message that the movement’s new military chief-of-staff wanted to send in an unprecedented interview at his headquarters of Anlong Veng. “ From now on, we are going to open this area free for foreigners, so they can see the real facts about our movement,” he said.

Anyone who accepts that invitation will find a mixed picture. Clearly, the purge of Pol Pot and a generational transfer of leadership has profoundly changed the secretive movement. In the interview, Khem Nuon spoke with openness about the past “crimes” and future plans, and he showed no interest in communist ideology.

At the same time, however, the group continues to sound the drum of rabid anti-Vietnamese ultra nationalism, and remains bent on the overthrow of Cambodian premier Hun Sen. Some of the older leaders who orchestrated the 1975-78 Cambodian reign of terror still wield influence, and younger cadres talk of “democracy” rang hollow against the backdrop of a Cultural revolution-style show trial.

The movement is opening up for a reason: It wants to build alliances both within the country and overseas for its crusade against Hun Sen and the “Vietnamese aggressors” that it claims are still occupying the country. Specifically, it wants to join forces with Funcinpec—whose leader co-Premier Prince Norodom Ranariddh, was ousted by Hun Sen in a July 5-6 coup—as well as with other political parties opposed to Hun Sen.

But Khem Nuon and other new leaders are aware that if they’re going to have any hope of winning Western support, they have to break with the movement’s blood-soaked past. “ The reason we put an end to the Pol Pot regime is because we want the international community to see and help us in our struggle with other movements in order to fight against Hun Sen and the Vietnamese,” Khem Nuon said.

To an international community that equates the Khmer Rouge with genocide, it’s going to be a hard sell. But Khem Nuon says the Khmer Rouge—or, more precisely, Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea Party—no longer exists. The movement is now called the National Solidarity Party.

“ If they still call me Khmer Rouge they haven’t seen what I have just done. I am the one who destroyed Pol Pot, who has been in power for many years,” he said after the group’s longtime leader was publicly denounced. “ Even the United States and the Vietnamese failed to get rid of him, but I can. So how can you call me the Khmer Rouge?”

In an unprecedented admission, he said that “crimes” had been committed during the Khmer Rouge’s nearly four year rule of Cambodia. But even when pressed, he would not go much farther, Blaming individuals rather than the group. “ We do condemn those who have committed crimes, which were not right,” Khem Nuon said. “ At the time I committed no crimes, only Pol Pot and some of his close people. Now they are gone, while Pol Pot is arrested. Some of them have defected to the Vietnamese side, and the rest I don’t know where they are.”

According to Khem Nuon and other Cadres, the movement is now led by a nine-member standing committee that includes only one member of the old guard: Khieu Samphan, the head of the committee, a diplomat who for years has been the public face of the Khmer Rouge. Khem Nuon, who’s aged about 50, is the second-ranking member, but his power is bolstered by his being the top military figure.

Yet Khem Nuon freely acknowledges that older leaders such as Gen. Ta Mok and Nuon Chea, who were key members of the murderous 1975-78 Khmer Rouge regime, still have a say in “all important matters.” Khem Nuon, who did military training in China, is the right-hand-man of the one-legged Ta Mok. “I’m the one who is in charge of the armed forces right now, but I keep consulting him all the time,” he said.

Once Hun Sen is driven out, the National Solidarity party would be happy to participate in democratic elections, Khem Nuon said. Tep Kunnal, another top-ranking standing committee figure, also spoke of liberal democracy as desirable. It seems that the new generation is driven less by communist ideology than by the ultra nationalism that has long under laid politics in a country squeezed between more powerful neighbors.

Khem Nuon claims there are 10,000 guerrillas and 60,000 civilians loyal to the movement around Anlong Veng. “Our movement is pure and clean,” he said. “ I hope the international community will help us.” For starters, he urged, “ Please ask them to stop calling us ‘Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.’”

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POL POT: THE END

COVER STORY

Harrowing Tales: Hun Sen’s forces torture and kill former allies

By Nate Thayer in Samrong, Cambodia and Bangkok

Far Eastern Economic Review

August 7, 1997

At the jungle hide-out along the Thai-Cambodian border, Gen. Serei Kosal, stuttering and wide-eyed with fear, relates five-days of flight from Phnom Penh through the Cambodian countryside. He was one of the top military officers targeted for arrest by Hun Sen, Cambodia’s second prime minister, who deposed the first prime minister, prince Norodom Ranariddh, in the July 5-6 coup.

Gen. Serei fled the capital on the morning of July 5 by commandeering a military aircraft to the western city of Battambang. From there, he travelled three days by foot with no food until he reached resistance-controlled zones along the Thai border. Claiming 700 troops under his command, he vowed to organize guerrilla war.

He was lucky to have escaped: The coup left scores dead, including two of his fellow generals, and hundreds arrested. Thousands of others are fleeing or in hiding.

“ We need a safe haven to protect our people from killing and arrest,” said Serei, dressed in borrowed shorts and shoeless. “ Hun Sen is hunting down our people, killing them, arresting them. Why hasn’t the world condemned the coup makers and acted in support of democracy and against the dictators?”

His bewilderment is shared by other Ranariddh loyalists who are flocking to north and northwest Cambodia to seek sanctuary and organize guerrilla resistance. They are joined daily in these jungles and remote villages near the Thai border by opposition-party members, journalists, and other civilians. Many relate harrowing tales of witnessing summary executions, atrocities, and the arrest of anyone suspected of affiliation with Ranariddh’s Funcinpec party.

From their accounts and evidence gathered by human rights officials, a grim picture is emerging of torture and summary execution by Hun Sen and his cohorts, many of whom are former Khmer Rouge soldiers who took part in the “killing fields” of the late 1970’s. Equally disturbing are allegations that foreign embassies refused help to Cambodians who feared for their lives in the first days after the coup when many of the killings occurred.

International human rights officials in Phnom Penh say they had confirmed 36 executions by mid-July and were verifying a dozen others. “ We have had many cases of bodies found, hands tied behind their back, with bullets in the head. But sometimes we arrive too late for the bodies and there are only ashes. They are literally incinerating the evidence,” said a senior Western human rights investigator in Phnom Penh. United Nations officials say they know of another 30 Funcinpec supporters who were tortured and forced to drink sewage.

Investigators say at least 617 people have been detained in Phnom Penh and another 271 are known to have been arrested outside the capital. They say the evidence beginning to trickle in is “only the tip of the iceberg,” but includes specific information linking Hun Sen’s top lieutenants to unspeakable acts of torture and murder.

Gen. Chau Sambath, a military advisor to Ranariddh, was captured while trying to flee the capital by motorcycle. According to human rights officials and Cambodian intelligence officers, Sambath was taken to Hun Sen’s personal compound on July 8 where he was tortured, then executed. The sources say his fingernails were pulled off and his tongue ripped out before he was killed by Gen. Him Bun Heang, chief of security for Hun Sen and head of his personal bodyguard. “ They wanted to know the military radio frequencies of Funcinpec leaders, so they tortured him at Hun Sen’s house,” said a senior Cambodian military intelligence officer. “ They pulled his tongue out of his head with pliers when he wouldn’t talk.”

Another Funcinpec general, secretary of state at the Ministry of Interior Ho Sok, was executed on the grounds of the ministry by the bodyguards of National Police Chief Gen. Hok Lundy, a loyalist of Hun Sen. According to Amnesty International, Ho Sok was arrested “ while attempting to find a country that would give him asylum.” He had taken refuge at the embassy of an Asean country, but was expelled at the request of Hun Sen’s aides and arrested as he drove to the luxury Cambodiana hotel, where many foreigners and Funcinpec officials had fled in the days after the coup. A Ministry of Interior spokesman confirmed the killing, saying it was done by “people who were angry with him.”

At least five bodyguards of Gen. Nyek Bun Chhay, the commander of Funcinpec forces, had their eyes gouged out while they were under interrogation, then executed, according to Western human rights officials and Cambodian military sources. After 14 days of flight through the countryside Nyek Bun Chhay has since arrived at the jungle headquarters and commands the resistance army.

Hundreds have already arrived in Thailand, including scores of Funcinpec officials, at least 24 members of parliament, journalists associated with independent newspapers, and officials of other political parties.

“The soldiers came to my house with rocket launchers looking for my steering committee members, putting their pictures on TV and posted in military offices,” said Sam Rainsy, Cambodia’s most prominent opposition politician and head of the Khmer Nation party. “ There is a campaign to destroy the KNP. The soldiers told people at my office ‘ We will not even let a baby asleep in a hammock stay alive.’ This is real Khmer Rouge language We cannot operate anymore. Democracy is finished.” More than 1000 of his party workers are now amassed at a jungle encampment along the Thai border under the protection of Funcinpec troops still loyal to Ranariddh.

“Killing and repression are going on on a very large scale. Hun Sen is a murderous prime minister,” Ranariddh told the REVIEW in Bangkok on July 20. “ I hope that the U.S. congress will call for a cessation of all aid to Hun Sen.”

But international condemnation of the coup has been decidedly muted, with the major donor countries still considering whether to support a government controlled by Hun Sen. If he maintains a credible coalition by co-opting ministers from Ranariddh’s Funcinpec party, he may win that support.

The ambivalence of major Western governments was foreshadowed by the reaction of their embassies in Phnom Penh during the coup—a response that has been criticized bitterly by Cambodian and human rights officials. They say the American and Australian embassies refused entry to Cambodian government officials who sought refuge on embassy grounds. The U.S. embassy also “flatly refused” requests of political asylum for some members of parliament or to issue them with emergency visas.

“We begged visas from Western embassies. We begged them to open their gates for people who were clearly targeted for persecution, and the Americans, the Australians, flatly said no,” said a foreign human rights official in Phnom Penh. “ These are the embassies who have pushed people to exercise their rights, have said they supported human rights and free expression and opposition politics, but when these very values are trampled upon and those who exercised their rights were targeted, they did nothing to help.”

American embassy sources said they had no clearance from Washington to offer political asylum and claim they were not approached directly by any Cambodians for sanctuary on embassy grounds.

The U.S. also set up a sanctuary on the grounds of the Cambodiana hotel in downtown Phnom Penh during the fighting that raged in the city. Some Cambodian parliamentarians who have since fled the country said they were denied access to the sanctuary in the hotel’s ballroom. The correspondent for Voice of America, Cambodian citizen Som Sattana, was refused access to the ballroom by embassy personnel, despite having received death threats, according to human rights workers. He has since left the country.

“We set up a U.S. embassy reception centre at the Cambodiana hotel early on Sunday (July 6) for American citizens,” said an embassy spokeswoman, who added: “ We were not open for visas during the fighting.”

The able to flee are regrouping in newly formed resistance zones in northern Cambodia. Several thousand heavily armed troops backed by tanks and artillery control a swath of territory across several provinces abutting the Thai border, including the contested northwestern provincial capital of Samrong.

Hundreds of Funcinpec members, exhausted from days of trekking across the country to reach Funcinpec-controlled areas, spoke of being hunted by Hun Sen’s forces. “ They are arresting people in their houses, in the jungle, along the road—anybody they think works for Funcinpec,” said Sok Nuon, a policeman who fled from Kampong Chhnang province.

Gen. Long Sereirath, formerly deputy commander of the 5th Military Region in the north, fought his way out of Siem Riep city four days after the coup. He said he went without food for three days before reaching Samrong. “ We will blow up key bridges to keep them from coming north with artillery,” he said, but added that his forces were desperately low on ammunition.

His commander, Lt. Gen. Khan Savouen, who is now leading resistance forces, appealed for foreign assistance from his front-line command post near national Route 6 in Siem Riep province.” We will fight even if we don’t get foreign assistance,” he said, surrounded by Russian T-54 tanks, armoured personnel carriers, heavy artillery and anti-aircraft guns. Heavy fighting raged a few kilometers away and his position was overrun the day after the REVIEW interviewed him.

POL POT: THE END

COVER STORY

DUBIOUS DONOR

Money man: Theng Bunma sent cash and gold for Hun Sen’s coup

By Nate Thayer

Far Eastern Economic Review

August 7, 1997

How much does it take to buy a coup? In Cambodia, the going rate seems to be $1 million. Suspected drug baron Theng Bunma said he gave that much in cash and gold to Second Prime Minister Hun Sen to fund the putsch which toppled co-premier Norodom Ranariddh.

“For the clash of 6th of July, 1997, I called Mr. Hun Sen and I talked to him. I gave him $1 million dollars to do whatever to control the situation,” said Bunma in an interview with Australian Channel 7 television.” He asked me if I had the money. I said no, but I would send 100 kilograms of gold in a plane into Cambodia.’ In return for his generosity, Bunma, reputed to be Cambodia’s richest businessman, enjoyed a perk of being a big-time coup financier: More than 300 hundred of Hun Sen’s troops, backed by tanks, were dispatched to protect Bunma’s property during the coup.

“ I say what the second prime minister did was correct. Why? One reason, take the example of my hotel. The other side wanted to destroy it, the government put three tanks and soldiers around to protect it,” he said. Asked whether Bunma had given the government the money, Cambodian Secretary of State for Information Khieu Kanharith replied:” Why would he give us a million dollars? I do not know what we are supposed to do with this money—it’s nothing, we need $100 million to finance the redevelopment of the whole country.”

Bunma also said he gave $50,000 dollars each to three leaders of a renegade faction of Ranariddh’s Funcinpec party “to encourage them”—Siem Riep governor Toan Chhay, Banteay Meanchey provincial governor Duong Khem and Minister of State Ung Phan.

The tycoon has denied allegations by the United States that he is involved in heroin trafficking.

November 09, 2011

Cambodia: Asia’s New Narco-State?

Far Eastern Economic Review

COVER STORY (Three story package below)

23 Nov 1995

Has Cambodia become a mafia state? Nate Thayer reports that in the two years since UN-run elections, criminal syndicates protected by high-ranking have turned the country into a major centre for heroin trafficking and money laundering. Doubly disturbing, some of the same military units accused of killing government opponents are implicated in drug smuggling and other crimes. Western aid donor countries are alarmed. Also: A profile of Theng Bunma, a businessman who has bestowed millions of dollars on the Cambodian regime.

(Authors note: The Review and I were sued by Theng Bunma for this story and I was forced to leave Cambodia for a short while because of serious threats to my life as a consequence of its publication. The U.S, government refused to go on the record that they had identified Bunma as an organized crime figure and drug trafficker, despite innumerable U.S. sources privately, in detail, saying he was. Thailand and Hong Kong, after publication of the below stories, both banned him from entry to their countries and issues criminal warrants for his arrest. Over drinks one night, in what will remain an unnamed remote Asian country, I was expressing frustration to a resident American diplomat at the U.S. refusal to acknowledge publicly Bunma’s status as banned from entry to the U.S. having been formally designated a drug trafficker. I was being sued by Bunma at the time causing considerable distraction. The diplomat responded: “Fuck that. Come to the embassy tomorrow morning. I’ll give you the documents.” I told him I wanted them to give to the Hong Kong court and he—the diplomat-- would be technically committing treason by giving me the classified documents. “Fuck it. You are a U.S. citizen. It is my job to protect American citizens.” I carried with me at the time a copy of Bunma’s Cambodian diplomat and civilian passport as well as his Thai passport under an alias. The next morning, I arrived at the embassy and the very accommodating American diplomat took the passport numbers, punched them into a computer, and up came Bunma’s classified designation as banned from entry to the U.S. based on his designation under two U.S. Immigration criminal classifications: (1) drug trafficker, and (2) “Undesirable person”—which often refers to an organized crime figure. “Which documents would you like?” asked the diplomat. “All of them,” I answered. He pushed print and out spit a U.S. government document, on embassy letterhead, stating Bunma was banned from entry to the U.S. that would appear on any immigration computer on entry to the United States. I turned it over to my lawyers, who turned it over to the Hong Kong court, who turned it over to Bunma’s lawyers. They dropped the lawsuit. I then wrote a follow up story based on the document and the Review printed a graphic photocopy of the official U.S. government document to emphasize the point. End of story)

CAMBODIA: Medellin on the Mekong:

The UN spent $3 billion to lay the foundation for peace and democracy in Cambodia. Now the country's fragile democratic institutions are being subverted by the wealth of drug lords. The REVIEW's Phnom Penh correspondent, Nate Thayer, researched these stories over a four-month period in Cambodia, Thailand, Hong Kong, France and the United States.

It wasn't your typical diplomatic luncheon. In February 1994, U.S. Ambassador Charles Twining invited Cambodian Finance Minister Sam Rainsy and another senior official to dine at his residence in Phnom Penh. Leading them into the living room, Twining turned up the music and lowered his voice.

Then, according to Rainsy, Twining asked him to convey a message to Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh: "Please tell Ranariddh not to get involved with Theng Bunma because we Americans have evidence that Theng Bunma is involved in drug trafficking." The other Cambodian official confirms the account.

The United States ambassador had just named Cambodia's wealthiest businessman, but the allegation didn't shock his listeners. Western governments, international law-enforcement officials and Cambodian sources say businessmen engaged in criminal activities have amassed immense power in Cambodia in the two-and-a-half years since United Nations-run elections. Protected by senior government officials, they've turned Cambodia into a major centre for drug trafficking, money laundering and smuggling.

Although Theng Bunma denies any wrongdoing (see story on page 27), his company has been fined at least twice since 1993 for attempting to smuggle gold and other goods into Cambodia. Yet Bunma holds a Cambodian diplomatic passport issued in January that identifies him as special adviser to National Assembly President Chea Sim. He's a benefactor of both prime ministers: He paid $1.8 million in August 1993 for Ranariddh's Kingair-200 plane and gave Second Prime Minister Hun Sen the Mercedes limousine that ferries him to official functions. He even helped underwrite the 1994 state budget with interest-free loans of several million dollars--effectively funding the dry-season offensive against the Khmer Rouge, the REVIEW has learned.

Cambodia is a place where, one American official charges, criminal syndicates "are using government planes, helicopters, military trucks, navy boats, and soldiers to transport heroin." Doubly disturbing, some of the same military units involved in drug trafficking have been implicated in political violence, pointing to dangerously close links between crime syndicates and political figures.

The allegations have far-reaching implications for Cambodia, which receives 44% of its $410 million annual budget in aid from Western donor countries. U.S. officials told the REVIEW that Cambodia will join 29 other countries on the Major Narcotics Country list in coming weeks, which could lead to a cut-off of aid.

France has already put Phnom Penh on notice that unless top officers it believes are involved in crime syndicates are removed from the national military police it will stop aiding the force. Australia, meanwhile, is worried by evidence that the navy--which it is assisting--is directly involved in shipping heroin.

The revelations could cause additional embarrassment to U.S. diplomats, whose government has officially made the fight against drug trafficking a top foreign-policy priority. In late April, Twining's embassy issued a visa to Theng Bunma--the same businessman the ambassador had alleged to be a drug smuggler. Bunma visited the U.S. as part of a delegation headed by Chea Sim, who was acting head of state.

Asked whether he had informed Rainsy of U.S. suspicions about Theng Bunma, Twining said: "We don't comment about confidential conversations with a host government." But his employer, the U.S. State Department, has publicly voiced its worries about Cambodia. In a report on narcotics and Cambodia issued in March, it said "involvement of some leading businessmen with access to the highest levels of government is a known concern. We are not aware of any prosecutions for narcotics-related corruption. There are indications that some high-level military officials and powerful businessmen who give financial support to politicians are involved in heroin smuggling."

Cambodian sources, international law-enforcement officials and diplomats say numerous senior military and police officers are involved in transporting heroin through Cambodia or protecting the traffic. The drug, originating in the Burmese segment of the Golden Triangle, arrives by land from Thailand and Laos, or aboard small boats from Thailand. Then most of it is shipped out of Cambodia through ports in the southwestern province of Koh Kong, destined mainly for the U.S. About a third departs through Phnom Penh's Pochentong airport, often destined for Europe.

"It is clear that Cambodia is a new and rapidly increasing trafficking route," says Bengt Juhlin, deputy head of the UN International Drug Control Project regional office in Bangkok. He points to the absence of an effective legal system, lack of resources to combat drug smuggling, and official corruption. "The presence of the three makes Cambodia very vulnerable."

An added attraction for international criminals is the ease of laundering money in Cambodia. A confidential report prepared this year for the Interior Ministry says that 19 of Phnom Penh's 29 banks are suspected of being fronts for cleaning tainted cash. As the BCCI scandal showed a few years ago, crooked banks pose a special risk to the international financial system. But it doesn't take a bank to launder--in Cambodia's cash economy, it's easy to unload dirty dollars at restaurants, nightclubs, luxury-goods dealerships and the casino.

"Cambodia is now a mafia state because there are a group of businessmen who consider themselves above the law, who have infiltrated all spheres, all aspects of government, the judiciary, the parliament," says Rainsy, who was sacked from his government post in September 1994 and has just formed an opposition political party. "These people--these politicians--are at least protecting and at worst working for the mafia."

It's a sinister symbiosis. When the influence of crime bosses permeates the apparatus of state, then elements of the security forces can become their tools. Critics say that's happening in Cambodia, compounding the climate of fear created by the government's increasingly heavy-handed treatment of its political opponents. In fact, the two units most frequently cited in connection with political violence and other human-rights abuses--the Defence Ministry's intelligence force and the national military police--are also deeply implicated in smuggling and other crimes, according to international law-enforcement officials and diplomats (see story on page 30).

That means those who highlight the links between crime bosses and government officials are doubly at risk. In August, after Phnom Penh's popular Morning News published reports about military complicity in heroin smuggling, a hand grenade was thrown in the house of the paper's publisher.

A year earlier, the editor of The Voice of Khmer Youth was shot dead at midday at a busy Phnom Penh intersection. The attack came just days after the newspaper published a detailed biography of Theng Bunma, accusing him of heading a large criminal syndicate whose activities included drug trafficking.

"Cambodia is now like Noriega in Panama. Nobody dares to speak out because they will be killed," says a senior officer in one of Cambodia's security services.

Police Gen. Nouen Souer, the former head of the national police anti-drug unit, is one of the few Cambodian officials to have spoken out publicly about government corruption and the drug trade. After his remarks were published in an August newspaper interview, he received death threats. He has been silent since then.

In the August interview, though, Souer claimed that 600 kilograms of heroin a week were coming through Phnom Penh. "I knew about this, but I couldn't do anything," he said. "The smugglers are rich and have high-ranking officials behind them." Asked who the high-ranking officials were, he replied: "I can't tell you or I will die."

Cambodian sources, international law-enforcement officials and diplomats name several wealthy and well-connected Cambodian businessmen as suspected heads of criminal syndicates. But none is better connected than Theng Bunma, a master at playing both sides of the fence.

In addition to bestowing gifts on the prime ministers, the magnate was linked to a failed July 1994 coup that attempted to shore up the power of some former communist officials who were being marginalized under the new regime. Cambodian and Thai officials say the 33 Thai nationals implicated in the coup plot arrived in Phnom Penh on air tickets booked by Bunma's holding company, the Thai Boon Roong Group. The invoice remains unpaid, however, and Bunma contends the order was unauthorized.

Until this year, Bunma seemed to be content to operate from behind a veil of enforced silence. But on October 15, he was elected president of the Cambodian Chamber of Commerce by a vote of 21-1. That shocked Western donor countries, who were well aware of Bunma's unsavory reputation. "This time they went too far," one Western ambassador in Phnom Penh quoted his U.S. colleague, Twining, as saying.

Twining's discomfort was understandable. His embassy had issued Bunma a visa so he could visit the U.S. in May as part of Chea Sim's delegation. That was 15 months after Twining's warning to Rainsy.

Twining and other U.S. officials refused to comment publicly on why suspected drug traffickers were issued visas, but one U.S. embassy source defends the decision: "We had no firm proof, only suspicions," he says.

But other U.S. government sources close to the issue reject that defence. "The decision was mainly political. We did not want to force a confrontation with a government that we have good relations with," says one official.

When several Thai MPs were put on the U.S. immigration "watch list" last year, barring them from entering the country because of suspected links to drug trafficking, the diplomatic and political fallout was heavy. Yet this time, the effort by diplomats to avoid controversy may have backfired.

To start with, letting suspected Cambodian drug traffickers into the U.S. appears to directly contradict post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy, which calls for "public diplomacy" to expose foreign officials who participate in or protect international crimes such as drug trafficking.

"It is in the drug trade's interest to remain behind the scenes working through corrupt government officials who can maintain a facade of probity and respectability. One of the best ways to routing out drug corruption is to expose it to public scrutiny," says the U.S. Government Narcotics Control Strategy report released by the State Department in March. "Corruption is a threat to any nation's security, for it allows criminal elements to undermine the legitimacy of the State from within."

When Chea Sim came to the U.S., his delegation's rooms at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington on May 8-10 were reserved and paid for in the name of Theng Bunma.

Chea Sim dined with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord, had talks with National Security Council officials, and met Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California, according to his official schedule prepared by the State Department. Teng Bunma didn't accompany Chea Sim on his official rounds in Washington, but Rohrabacher was incensed when he learned afterwards that U.S. officials suspected a member of the Cambodian delegation of involvement in the drug trade.

"If Chea Sim was accompanied to the United States by major drug dealers, I would be very upset. Not only upset with the drug dealers, but upset with my own government for not tipping me off," says the congressman, who met Chea Sim on May 10. "The Cold War is over. We have no more excuse to turn a blind eye to this kind of behavior by governments."

President Bill Clinton seems to agree. In a speech marking the 50th anniversary of the UN, he announced that the U.S. was identifying and putting on notice countries that tolerate laundering of drug money, and threatened economic sanctions against governments that failed to crack down.

"President Clinton's speech . . . represents a significant new conception of U.S. foreign policy," Zoe Baird, a member of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, wrote on October 25. "The U.S. may stop supporting a leader who is tolerant of a drug cartel though it previously supported him because he was a staunch anti-communist. The U.S. may risk embarrassing or destabilizing a government that is weak in rooting out--or protects--terrorists or organized crime."

The Cambodian government protests that it is doing what it can to fight crime. On September 15, it set up a special committee chaired by the prime ministers to combat drug-related crimes. Already, it says it's "closely cooperating with international organizations--such as the UN and Interpol and with countries such as the U.S. and France--in implementing measure aimed at ferreting out and apprehending criminals, seizing drugs and sending them to the court."

But unless concrete results are visible soon, it may be too late to protect U.S. aid to Cambodia. American officials say it's only a matter of weeks before Cambodia is placed on the Major Narcotics Country list. Once that happens, U.S. law will require that Phnom Penh demonstrate that it has "taken legal and law-enforcement measures to prevent and punish public corruption--especially by senior government officials--that facilitates the production, processing or shipment of narcotic drugs, or that discourages investigation or prosecution of such acts."

If Cambodia cannot satisfy these terms, the U.S. is obliged to consider halting most forms of bilateral assistance, and voting against multilateral assistance programmes such as those of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank--the financial lifeblood of the Cambodian government.

In several cases, countries that failed to meet the criteria were issued U.S. "national-interest waivers" by the White House, sparing them from the full force of sanctions. But Cambodia, which lacks the strategic importance of a country like Pakistan, could conceivably end up on a short list of the countries that have been "decertified" by the U.S: Afghanistan, Burma, Iran, Syria and Nigeria. That would give it virtual outlaw status.

"You don't want to be on that list," says one U.S. official. "Its significance is the loss of assistance, but it's also political. It's like being on the terrorist list."

(Story two)

Sugar Daddy

Businessman emerges as pillar of the regime

His name is a household word to Cambodians, from noodle vendors to civil servants. It is synonymous with wealth and power on the streets of Phnom Penh. “In Khmer, we say ‘He makes the rain, he makes the thunder’,” says a senior Cambodian official. “Everybody knows that Theng Bun Ma can do what he wants.”

Theng Bun Ma, a 54-year-old ethnic Chinese, is Cambodia’s richest businessman. But his aura of power doesn’t come from his October 15 election as president of the Cambodian Chamber of Commerce—it comes from his close connection to the country’s political and military elite.

With interests ranging from cigarette distributorship to a casino, Bunma’s company, the Thai Boon Roong Group, is Cambodia’s biggest taxpayer. But he has also showered the leadership with gifts and even helped underwrite the military budget.

Clearly, Bunma has come a long way from the eastern province of Kampong Cham, where he started out as a driver’s assistant on a rural bus line and moved into small trading. “I was young, then I traded rice and ran buses,” he said in a rare interview with a Phnom Penh journalist, “I had contact with Thai’s selling beans, sugar, cement.”

That wasn’t all he traded, according to a detailed biography published in a Phnom Penh newspaper in August 1994. The Voice of Khmer Youth alleges that in 1972, Bunma was arrested in the western city of Battambang, when he tried to smuggle 20 kilos of opium in from Thailand under the hood of his car.

Sentenced to twenty years in prison, Bunma bribed a guard and escaped, it charged. “Using a bamboo stalk as a ladder, he crawled out a prison window (and)…hid in a rice loft. The court issued an arrest warrant for Bunma. From this point on, Bunma took refuge at the Khmer-Thai border,” the newspaper said.

Less than a week after the newspaper printed the biography, its editor was gunned down by men in military uniform in broad daylight on a busy Phnom Penh street. No one has been arrested for the murder.

Bunma said he moved to Thailand in 1972 simply because Khmer Rouge guerrillas were disrupting trade. Whatever the reason for the move, Bunma received a Thai citizenship card on July 8, 1975. The next month he registered Thai Boon Roong as an import-export company with capital of $100,000. “I did business through waterways using ships to transport goods to sell in Vietnam,” Bunma said in the interview.

It was a tumultuous time to be trading with Vietnam, where the south had just fallen to the communists. The Voice of Khmer Youth report said that Bunma used boats to smuggle everything from palm oil to tobacco into the country, returning with Vietnamese girls and well-off Sino-Vietnamese refugees.

Smuggling made Bunma a rich man, the newspaper said. That charge incenses the tycoon, who prepared for the October interview by having an aide tape a patch of traditional Chinese medicine to his chest. “You’ll be asking questions so I am putting this patch on for fear that my energy is not strong enough,” he said. “My heart is not strong.”

Then he lashed out at public accusation that “I am mafia, that I deal in drugs.” Bunma said he made his fortune during the Thai property boon of the 1980’s. “Can the people who do dirty business be equal to me? I sold a piece of land on Sukhumvit (in Bangkok), which I’d bought for $400 million, and I sold it for than $800 million. I bought another piece of land, also in Thailand, for $100 million and I sold it for $470 million. Do people dealing in drugs make that much money?”

Bunma didn’t explain, however, where the initial capital came from. Nor did Thai Boon Roong’s move into real-estate mean an end to smuggling: Cambodian customs officers have fined the company at least twice in recent years for illegally importing goods: One incident in 1993 involved 104 kilograms of gold.

Bunma, who is managing director of the Thai Boon Roong group, said it was a desire to “reconstruct the Khmer nation” that made him one of the first major investors in Cambodia after the country started opening up in 1992. Actually, Bunma was already trading with Cambodia on a massive scale by the late 1980’s, and he helped the army meet its payroll when Soviet and Vietnamese aid ended.

In the early 1990’s, he snapped up hundreds of hectares of property in Phnom Penh and the deep-water port of Sihanoukville. When the government began privatizing its assets, He became a major contributor to the formerly communist ruling party, the Cambodian People’s Party, in the run-up to the 1993 UN-run elections.

Bunma now has major stakes in a wide range of legitimate businesses in Cambodia, including the Mekong bank, the Holiday International casino, the Regency Park hotel-office complex, a daily newspaper and a plywood factory. Thai Boon Roong is partnered with Intercontinental Hotels in building Phnom Penh” first five-star hotel. It also has exclusive distribution rights for Jet brand Indonesian cigarettes in Indochina; business associates say the monopoly nets at least $4 million a month on sales of 100,000 cases.

In the interview, Bunma also talked about owning three Boeing 737 aircraft and “49 pieces of land in Thailand, but I have not had time to construct.”

Bunma’s business skills have earned him his share of admirers. Says one Overseas Chinese Businessman in Phnom Penh: “he keeps his word. There is not a lot of paperwork in the traditional Chinese way of doing business, and he always pays his bills.”

Says another associate: “He is a very shy person, quiet, dignified. There is a physical presence, but he doesn’t swagger. For what it is worth, he is a very doting grandfather.”

One Asian intelligence agency, which has an extensive file on Bunma, mentions that he suffers from diabetes. He speaks Khmer, Thai, and Chinese, but no European languages.

“He is very demanding—he only eats dishes prepared by his wife,” said the newspaper biography. He has been married twice and has ten children—eight sons and two daughters. One son is the director of the Mekong bank; the other runs Sharaton Hotel in Phnom Penh, which houses the casino.

The casino business is perhaps most emblematic of the man, who used to spend his free time gambling on card games even as a small-time trader in sleepy Battambang. Now, according to an Asian intelligence official, “every time he gambles it’s not less than $1 million.”

(Story three)

The Storm Troopers

Abuses prompt donor countries to reconsider aid

It wasn’t exactly a clean getaway. When confronted by Phnom Penh’s anti-drug squad early this year, a gang of suspected heroin traffickers opened fire on police and to sanctuary inside a compound belonging to military intelligence on the western edge of the capital.

Was that a sign that the Cambodian Defence Ministry’s feared intelligence force was abandoning its security role for more lucrative pursuits? No, apparently it was just diversifying: On July 13, dissident politician Sam Rainsy’s bodyguards were dragged to the same compound, where they were beaten and threatened.

Diplomats, international law-enforcement officials and human-rights advocates who monitor Cambodia say a disturbing pattern has emerged: The same military and police units responsible for violence against opponents of the government are also the most deeply implicated in criminal activities. These include military intelligence and the national military police, or gendarmerie.

The way crime permeates the apparatus of state is problematic for Western aid donors. It is particularly awkward for France, which is aiding the military police. French officials say they notified the Phnom Penh government in October that unless the commander of the military police—Gen. Kien Savuth—is purged, France will halt its multimillion- dollar programme to train and equipt the force.

Formed during the 1979-1989 Vietnamese occupation and still essentially controlled by the same men, military intelligence and the military police both adapted quickly to life after communism after the signing of the 1991 Cambodian peace agreement. “From the very beginning, these people, in addition to arresting, held people for ransom,” says a former top official of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (Untac), which organized the 1993 elections. “They have been involved in both extortion arrests and political arrests.”

Untac documents implicate the current head of military intelligence, Maj-Gen. Chhum Socheat, in a number of incidents of political intimidation and violence during the run-up to the 1993 election, including the abduction and execution of four opposition-party activists in Battambang, in western Cambodia.

Military intelligence troops have been enforcing a reign of terror in western Cambodia since at least 1991, according to a 1994 report from the UN Centre for Human Rights. The confidential UN report said intelligence units were “making use of wide and uncontrolled powers they enjoy in the province to arrest, detain, interrogate, torture, and execute to carry out, concurrently to their military intelligence work, more lucrative activities.”

Socheat was responsible for the 5th military region, which covers western Cambodia, at the time.

One UN official assigned to investigate a murder committed by senior military intelligence officers, vented his frustration with their impunity in a March 13, 1993 memo to his superiors: “Is someone going to escape going to trial for cold-blooded murder merely because he is a high-level military figure?” he said. “If so, this Human Rights Officer would prefer someone else tell the sister of the victim.”

The record of the military police, which answers directly to the two prime Ministers, isn’t much better. From 1985 through 1993, Gen. Kien Savuth’s 820-man unit was responsible for Phnom Penh’s security. It was called in by the Prime Minister to put down anti-corruption demonstrations in December 1991. According to the former top Untac official, the unit was directly “implicated in the killings of unarmed demonstrators during the unrest” and “was responsible for numerous cases of ill-treatment of peasants” during other operations.

“because of its record, recommendations were made during the Untac period that it be made among the first units to be demobilized because its very existence was antithetical to the creation of a neutral political environment,” the former official says.

Instead, the unit survived the Untac period and was transformed into a military police force after the election. In October, the gendarmes were used to break up an opposition-party meeting that had been banned by Hun Sen. Earlier, grenades were thrown and more than 30 opposition officials and supporters were hurt.

The nationwide networks of military intelligence and military police give them the means to traffic contraband, Nguon Pen, deputy governor of Stung Treng province, charged in September that planes controlled by the military were flying heroin from the province, which borders Laos, to Phnom Penh. “Who can fight them if some of the crimes are committed by those in the army themselves,” he said.

Military intelligence’s Gen. Socheat and the gendarmerie’s Gen. Savuth have something else in common: links to powerful businessmen. Uniformed and plainclothes gendarmes guard Theng Bunma’s residence in Phnom Penh, and also handle security at the Holiday International casino, which Bunma controls.

In February 1994, gendarmes forcibly evicted hundreds of families from a property owned by Bunma near Phnom Penh and slated for development. Gen. Savuth personally directed the operation, during which scores of villagers were beaten, one child shot to death, and one man taken into custody and executed, according to foreign human-rights investigators.

A record like that has made France balk. “We have officially told the Cambodian government already that if Gen. Kien Savuth is not dismissed, removed as head of the military police, we will not support them anymore. We will be forced to halt our gendarme programme,” a senior French official in Phnom Penh told the REVIEW. “We know very well the truth about this man. We cannot continue to support him.”

Australia, another key donor country in Cambodia, is faced with a similar dilemma. Much of Australia’s military assistance programme is focused on helping Cambodia rebuild its navy. But law enforcement officials say some elements at the navy are deeply involved in criminal syndicates, using naval vessels to transport or protect shipments of heroin and marijuana. “We are very disturbed by some of what we know,” says an Australian official in Phnom Penh.

Cambodia’s main drug export route is the southwestern coastal province of Koh Kong, where former navy chief Adm. Tea Vinh, the younger brother of Defence Minister Tea Banh, wields immense influence. A foreign narcotics official says that since 1991 “our intelligence began picking up four to six shipments a year” of high-grade refined heroin through Koh Kong, with each shipment weighing at least 300 kilograms. That is probably just the tip of the iceberg, he adds. “The only thing hampering them is the weather.”

Not that there isn’t the occasional raid. A combined force of police and customs officials swooped down on a speedboat off Koh Kong on August 11, seizing 71 kilograms of heroin. But two of the arrested smugglers were cops, who quickly fingered their superior officer. “The province of Koh Kong is completely under the control of the mafia,” charges a senior Cambodian government official. “Virtually the entire political structure is involved in illegal activities.’

Frantic calls from Regent's Rm 406

Phnom Penh Post

By Nate Thayer

Friday, 15 July 1994

The Post's Nate Thayer describes how he shared Prince Chakrapong's final hours in Cambodia after receiving a dramatic 6:30 am phone call.

Loyalist troops had taken positions throughout the capital on the night of July 2 as rumors swept the city that a coup attempt was imminent. Heavily armed soldiers were positioned outside the homes of government leaders and military installations by dark, and the children of senior officials were ordered to stay out of the city nightclubs.

Officials confirmed "there will be trouble tonight" and spoke of a coup attempt.

At 3:00 am government forces surrounded the houses of the alleged putsch leaders, who they named as former Interior Minister Sin Song and former Deputy Prime Minister Prince Norodom Chakrapong.

Their houses were invaded, and weapons and communication equipment seized. Sin Song was arrested and allegedly confessed to his role in launching a coup. Chakrapong had fled his house hours before security forces arrived.

At 6:30 am a call to this reporter said "call this number" and hung up. A jittery voice answered after I dialed the mobile phone. "This is Prince Chakrapong. Please, please help me," he said in a frightened broken whisper, "Come right away to the Regent hotel. They have surrounded me. They are trying to kill me."

In the 20 minutes it took for me to arrive, the Prince called me seven times begging for me to come quickly. "I am alone. Please, before they kill me, come now. Call the American Embassy and tell them my life is in danger."

He was obviously hoping that a foreign presence might prevent the security forces from harming him.

Government troops and security forces armed with machine guns, rocket launchers, and carrying walkie talkies were positioned on the street corners and entrance ways around the hotel near Monivong Boulevard when I arrived on the otherwise quiet early Sunday morning. But no one tried to stop me, probably thinking I was a hotel guest.

Inside, hotel workers, white with fear, stared blankly in response to my inquiry of where the alleged coup leader was staying. But maids hovering in an upstairs hallway, opened Room 401.

A disheveled, barefoot, and petrified son of King Sihanouk was found emerging from a crawl space above the ceiling of his hotel room, begging for help.

"Please, they are trying to arrest me. They will kill me. I am innocent. Please tell the American Ambassador to come right away. I need protection," the wide-eyed Prince said, near tears, and jittery from lack of sleep. He was alone. The bed was still made, and the curtains were drawn. A ceiling panel was removed revealing a small dark crawl space. A chair was under it to allow one to climb up. He said troops had been surrounding him since 3:00 am.

"I hear the rumor that I plan to make a coup d'etat. I am innocent. I have nothing in my hands. I have no political influence now. I have no troops," he said. "Please don't leave me."

So began a four-and-a-half-hour drama that, after scores of frantic phone calls and negotiations, ended with the Prince being whisked to the airport by military escort and forcibly exiled via a scheduled Malaysia Airlines flight to Kuala Lumpur.

Frightened hotel staff hovered in hallways and peeked out of rooms in the otherwise completely silent hotel.

Realizing that there was no press or diplomats aware of the developments, and I was alone with a hunted, hated alleged coup plotter. Surrounded by troops clearly prepared to invade, I opted to rent my own room down the hall, with a better view of the troops, street, and hotel entrance way.

I went downstairs to the front desk asked for Room 406 and handed over cash. The desk clerk stared with a furrowed brow look of fear and alarm, said nothing, and handed me the key.

I thought that it might diminish the incentive of the troops outside to act precipitously if I was in a room rented under my own name, and buy time to interview the Prince. The Prince thought it was a great idea and came over to Room 406.

I made a quiet call to senior government contacts and diplomats informing them of the situation, hoping that they would get the message to the troops downstairs - quickly.

My phone rang a few minutes later, saying that Co-Prime Minister Ranariddh was aware I was with the man who allegedly was trying to topple his government and assassinate top officials.

The three mobile phones in my room rang constantly. More than 40 calls came in within the first two hours, as Chakrapong desperately tried to delay the troops from arresting him, and attempted to convince US Ambassador Charles Twining to give him political asylum.

Chakrapong repeatedly denied to me that he was involved in any coup attempt, cursed the leaders of the government, begged for my help and asked me not to leave him if the troops invaded.

He fielded phone calls constantly on his two phones, often listening silently and hanging up, speaking in English, French, and Khmer.

King Norodom Sihanouk rang from Beijing. "I am alright Papa, but the situation is bad. They have surrounded me," he said at one point.

As more calls came in he broke down and again moist-eyed. He looked dejected as Queen Norodom Monineath Sihanouk kept him up to date from Beijing with the state of her negotiations with government leaders over allowing him exile.

"It is not the Queen, but as my parents. It is not politics, it is as a son," he told me when asked whether King Sihanouk and Queen Monineath supported him.

For the first two hours, he was in fear of his life, convinced that if arrested he would be killed.

"They tell me that if we criticize the government, we are serving the interests of the Khmer Rouge. If I am arrested, the embassies must stay with me, to keep looking for me. Please don't let them take me anywhere. Please don't leave me alone," he said to me.

The Prince asked me to contact the US Embassy to request political asylum. I give him the mobile telephone number of the US Ambassador Charles Twining. He calls and Twining is put on the phone. "I ask your protection, your excellency. It is a human right. If you don't come to protect me I prefer not to go outside. I prefer to die here. I will stay here in the room. How can I trust them if they bring me somewhere?", he says to Twining.

Prince Chakrapong's face shows that the American Ambassadors response is not positive. "Please your excellency, if they bring me outside, if they arrest me, they will kill me."

Chakrapong hung up from Twining and went to look outside. The street was quiet save for troops standing guard. "Twining says 'you are not an American citizen, we cannot help you,' " he said.

"They say this is a liberal democracy," staring from behind the curtain down at the soldiers, "They are silencing all opposition now. We will all be accused of serving the interests of the Khmer Rouge. The whole world must know that this regime accuses me without proof. If the free world helps this regime it is the end of democracy."

Another American diplomat called my phone: "Tell Chakrapong he is not a US citizen. As long as the government proceeds in a legal fashion regarding his human rights, there is nothing we can do to interfere in a sovereign government."

But the American message of rejection of official protection was clear.

Crying young hotel maids burst into the room at one point: "The soldiers are coming. They are inside now."

A disheveled Prince - barefoot, shirt unbuttoned, sleepless, and dejected-began to put on his shoes. He handed me his wallet and mobile telephones and asked me to give them to his daughters. "Please make sure my daughters are alright. The soldiers invaded my house last night and they were there."

But the soldiers didn't come in. And the phones rang incessantly, sometimes three at the same time. At one point, Chakrapong had King Sihanouk on the line in one hand, and Twining on the other.

The Queen was still negotiating for safe passage out of the country.

Finally Prime Minister Ranariddh - Chakrapong's nemesis and half brother - agreed to allow the Prince to leave the country. "If I am allowed to join my family in Malaysia, I will accept," he said at one point.

By 10 am we saw Twining, other diplomats, and press begin to gather on the street, to the great relief of the Prince.

"I have given ten years of my life for my country for nothing. They are looking for a plane for me," he said after hanging up from a call from the queen.

"I want you to tell them I am innocent. I am a military man. I know how to make a coup. Now, I have no power and no forces. How can I make a coup? If I was to do something would I stay here in Phnom Penh?

"I left last night with no bodyguards to come to the hotel because I felt something was wrong. Like when I was in the jungle. I knew on the battlefield when something bad would happen. But I was not afraid because I was innocent."

The military called from downstairs to say that the troops were coming to our room now and that the Prince would be allowed to leave the country.

He turned to me: "Please do not leave me. I will only leave if you go with me to the airport in the same car. They may not take me to the airport."

There was a strong knock on the door and I went to open it. A score of heavily armed soldiers and security police waited in the hallway as Twining and Co-Minister of Interior You Hockry entered alone. The four of us sat down.

Hockry asked me to leave. Prince Chakrapong asked that I stay. I said nothing.

"We will promise your safety to the airport. I promise there will be no guns on the plane. The best thing for us it to bring you safely to the airport," Hokry told the Prince.

Men were sent to get passports and luggage at Chakrapong's house. A Malaysian Airlines plane was held on the tarmac at Pochentong as Chakrapong was assured that he would be allowed to safely leave the country.

The behavior of several Ministry of Interior police, who were poised to arrest the Prince until minutes before, now went through a bizarre somersault. They entered the room crouched on their knees and hands clasped to their heads in deference to Royalty as they went about their business preparing to send him to exile.

The Interior Minister said that Chakrapong's alleged collaborator, Sin Song, had confessed. "I think that one or two people cannot do this kind of thing. There will be more arrests," he said. Chakrapong stared blankly, with a mixed expression of anger and fear.

At one point, while, we waited for the motorcade and luggage downstairs, Twining turned to Hockry.

"I just remembered, there will be a fireworks display this afternoon at the fourth of July celebration," he said, suddenly realizing that, as a jittery city emerged from an attempted coup, explosions in the city might not be timely.

"Do you have authorization?" the Minister shot back to the Ambassador, with an alarmed look on his face.

When the mobile phone rang to say that the motorcade of troops was ready, we left the room to walk to the street. Hotel staff and soldiers clasped their hands and knelt in respect as Chakrapong was led by a bevy of sunglassed, automatic weapon-toting officials through a throng of cameras waiting on the street.

Shoved into a sleek Toyota with black tinted windows, we were whisked to the airport in a convoy of a score of cars, including one with Twining. Streets were blocked off and hundreds of people lined them to watch the motorcade pass. The plane was waiting at the airport, full of curious passengers, as Chakrapong was whisked on board and the flight departed.

He called several hours later from Malaysia saying: " I want to thank you sincerely for saving my life. They would have killed me if you had not come. I am innocent. I was not involved in anything. Tell them I am innocent."

Faded red: The death throes of the KR

Phnom Penh Post

By Nate Thayer

Friday, 21 April 1995

The final chapters of history are being readied for one of the most brutal regimes in recent times, the Khmer Rouge. Nate Thayer investigates.

ANGKOR CHUM, SIEM REAP - Along this isolated stretch of provincial highway, 19 blown bridges isolate the remnants of villages that were burned to the ground in recent months by Khmer Rouge guerrillas.

Huge craters in the road explain the carcasses of trucks destroyed recently by anti-tank mines. Dozens of soldiers with protective eye-wear gently expose thousands of land mines laid in rice fields, as truckloads of ragged government troops pass by on the way to nearby front lines.

Intermittently, deafening explosions mark another mine detonated in place. The automatic weapons bursts puncturing the quiet have been a regular feature of life in rural Cambodia for more than 25 years.

The tree line on the other side of the rice paddy marks Khmer Rouge zones, where the remnants of one of the worlds last communist guerrilla movements wages what now seems a war without issue. But despite the depressing scenario of ongoing warfare, most Cambodians and analysts agree, the Khmer Rouge appear, ultimately, to be doomed.

In the wake of a vicious military campaign of terror targeting civilians begun late last year, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge have suffered significant defeats in northern Cambodia in recent months. Nearly half their forces in this once key stronghold of Siem Riep have defected to the new government, unwilling to continue fighting what they say is a hopeless cause with no clear objective. While it may be a few years away, analysts agree that the group is dying a slow death, with little chance of recovering as a potent political force.

"The Khmer Rouge must die because they have lost their political base, their support base, their ideological base. Now they just have an army, and the army has turned against the masses," said Siem Riep governor Toan Chhay.

The governor is not just spouting government propaganda. Since 1979 until 1993's UN-sponsored election, Toan Chhay was chief of staff of the royalist guerrilla army that fought with the Khmer Rouge. His forces shared jungle supply lines, covert Chinese aid, and battlefield strategies with Pol Pot, aimed at ousting the Vietnamese occupation army and the government they installed.

Now, as a senior official of the government that emerged from those 1993 elections, he is welcoming Khmer Rouge defectors using psychological warfare and political and economic incentives. Against the recalcitrant hard-core cadre still fighting from increasingly remote jungle outposts, he and the army are coordinating military assaults.

For the government, the combined use of amnesty where Khmer Rouge elements are sincerely invited to defect without retribution and effective but cautious military pressure has turned Siem Riep province into a model of national reconciliation that has brought a level of peace and development unseen in decades.

In many areas long under guerrilla control, Khmer Rouge defectors have rallied to the government and continue to administer the same zones they did as guerrilla cadre. Four months ago, much of Ankor Chum district, 30 kilometers from Angkor temple, was at war, inaccessible to government forces. In January, after Pol Pot and other Khmer Rouge leaders ordered troops to kidnap and execute local officials, burn villages, and mine roads that connect the desperately poor communes, many long time cadre said enough is enough.

552 Khmer Rouge guerrillas in Angkor Chum alone defected to the government after their commanders cut a deal with provincial authorities. Last week, in a bizarre scene, hundreds of armed Khmer Rouge, still in their Chinese PLA style uniforms, lounged in village markets, flirting with vendors and providing security against the remnants of their former comrades now hunkered in small groups in the surrounding jungle.

"When we received the order to carry out the policy to attack the people and villages, I led the people into the forest to protect them, but of course then my commanders wanted to kill me," said Tung Yun, 38, who commanded two regiments of 600 guerrilla fighters until January. He smiled as a 152 mm artillery parked near his house shook the earth as it fired at his former Division commander, who with less than 75 men, had retreated to the jungle a few kilometers away. "Don't worry, I took all the big weapons with me, they can't fire back."

Tung joined the Khmer Rouge in 1974. "Wherever I looked in 21 years I never found a happy place," he said over lunch in a handsome village house that belongs to relatives. "The happiest I have been is now." Tung continues to command his troops, and the government now pays his salary and provides his ammunition. "I don't know why they are still fighting, I guess they just want power."

Meanwhile, the defections have meant unprrecedented levels of security in many areas of Siem Riep, allowing an array of development projects such as road construction, dam repair, demining around former front-line villages, and agricultural infrastructure improvements. These efforts have increased levels of local support for the government, further eroding the rebels' ability to appeal to the sympathies of long neglected villagers.

The Khmer Rouge leadership view forces like Tung's differently: "In certain units, 50 to 60% (of our troops) are organized enemy elements" who are "poisoned by enemy ideas", say written directives from Pol Pot and Ta Mok issued in late 1994 and obtained from defectors in Siem Riep.

But despite the clear-cut successes of the government in marginalizing the Khmer Rouge in Siem Riep, it stands in stark contrast to the other primary area of guerrilla influence-Battambang. There, the guerrillas have been able to deflect government military offensives effectively and remain capable of sustaining themselves.

Cancerous levels of corruption from top to bottom in government and military abuses continue to be a major source of popular discontent and provide a ripe breeding ground for anti-government sympathy. Says a source close to the Khmer Rouge: "Corruption is the basis of the regime. Personal gain has replaced any ideology. Reasons to resist the government remain."

"The weakness of the DK should not be considered by itself. It should be considered in the framework of a balance of forces," says a source close to the Khmer Rouge leadership. "Even a weak DK remains something strong compared to this government."

Agrees Toan Chhay: "We need to strengthen the discipline of our own soldiers. It is not a Khmer Rouge problem, it is our problem."

In Battambang there have been no significant defections in recent years. Analysts say that the military and provincial government there is sufficiently corrupt and brutal that there is little incentive or atmosphere of trust that encourage the Khmer Rouge to come over to the government side. Human rights workers and government sources in Battambang say that the military continues to carry out murder, intimidation, and extortion of innocent civilians as well as families suspected of having Khmer Rouge connections. Government sources say that there have been several cases of Khmer Rouge forces attempting to negotiate to defect, only to be scuttled by local military leadership more interested in confrontation and revenge than reconciliation.

The legendary resilience of the Khmer Rouge organization should not be underestimated, say those who know the Khmer Rouge well. They point out that, except for their disastrous three years, eight months, and 20 days in power in the late 1970's, Pol Pot and his top cadre have lived underground in difficult jungle conditions since the 1960's fighting a series of governments considerably more formidable than the current regime.

But while these failures of the government may allow for the Khmer Rouge to continue as an army for years, there is little to indicate that they have a future as a political movement. The Khmer Rouge no longer seem to have a political program of significant credibility in the countryside. They are fighting for survival, say analysts, resembling warlords more than revolutionaries, rebels without a cause. Defectors speak of a hierarchy isolated, demoralized, and increasingly unable to get their troops to implement the directives of the leadership. Intelligence sources and defectors say that more moderate elements who favored a political solution to the conflict have waned in influence and more hard-line field commanders are on the ascendancy.

"The first priority of the DK has always been to defend and preserve their leadership and forces," says a source close to the movement. "It is the number one priority before launching offensives or actions against the enemy."

For the first time since they were ousted from power by the Vietnamese invasion in 1979, the Khmer Rouge are employing new tactics in the countryside that include targeting normal peasants and burning whole villages effectively abandoning their previous hearts and minds strategy.

"In 1979, we were on our deathbed. We should have died in 1979. Why didn't we die? Because even though we made alot of mistakes, and had many enemies who hated us... in every situation we have kept control of the countryside, and that is the reason we have been able to survive," Pol Pot said in a 1992 speech to senior cadre. "Our army was completely defeated and dismantled, but was rebuilt from the countryside. The necessity for us is the countryside, not communism."

But their renewed campaign of terror in rural villages - scores of which have been razed in recent months - have deeply alienated much of their previous base of support and many of their own fighters. Many of the villages are populated by families of their own cadre, who have abandoned the movement and joined the government after being asked to attack their own kin. As a result the remaining Khmer Rouge cadre in some key areas of the country have been denied access to food and provisions which came from these same villages.

"The Khmer Rouge strategy is to regroup, keep the struggle alive and tell the world they are still alive," said Toan Chhay. "Blow up bridges, lay mines. OK, we will rebuild the bridges again and again."

Both sources close to the Khmer Rouge and western intelligence officials confirm that the Khmer Rouge leadership has approved the use of terrorism - including urban attacks - as a new tactic. "Many people in the leadership want to use terrorism now. I can't be more specific," says a source knowledgeable of current thinking within the leadership. Western intelligence officials say they have hard evidence that the Khmer Rouge have sanctioned targeting westerners for terrorist attacks. Such attacks, analysts agree, would be extremely difficult to prevent because of widespread availability of weapons and explosives and lack of effective control of Phnom Penh by security services.

But perhaps most importantly, for the first time in 30 years, the Khmer Rouge have found that both foreign and domestic allies that were essential for the groups survival have evaporated. The United Nations, the US, and ASEAN who backed the Khmer Rouge-dominated guerrilla coalition during the Vietnamese occupation, now are focusing on strengthening the current government and helping destroy the guerrilla faction. The political and material support of China has halted. In recent months Thailand has gone to great lengths to diminish crucial cross border access. And the Khmer Rouge's former battlefield allies during the 1980's are now the internationally recognized government that emerged from the $3 billion UN peace plan that culminated in elections in May 1993.

In his Feb 1992 speech, Pol Pot predicted the current scenario: "Democratic Kampuchea (the Khmer Rouge) cannot be strong all on it's own. When these guys (UN and western powers) strafe everybody else and leave Democratic Kampuchea on it's own, it is possible for Democratic Kampuchea to be weakened. Once that happens they will attack Democratic Kampuchea and drag the other forces into joining with Phnom Penh. It would become an alliance between the West, the (Vietnamese), the contemptible puppets, and two of the three parties. If this were the case, then the Chinese, the Thai and ASEAN would all accept it whether they liked it or not... that is why we need friends among the three parties until the day we die, and we need (foreign) friends until the day we die." But if one thing is clear, the Khmer Rouge have few, if any, friends these days.

The crackdown on covert Thai military support has hurt the Khmer Rouge deeply, according to sources close to the faction. Without access to Thailand, the key guerrilla rear bases along the Thai border would be unable to sustain themselves, deprived of foodstuff, fuel, medicine and other key commodities. While smuggled support continues it is greatly diminished, sources close to the guerrilla faction say.

Meanwhile, the Khmer Rouge are now threatened with losing much of their main sources of gem and timber income. Thai businessmen and intelligence sources confirm that the vast majority of the gem fields near Pailin which brought millions of dollars a month to Khmer Rouge coffers in recent years, have virtually dried up.

In the Thai border town of Borei, where cross border gem trading was centered, most of the scores of banks and big gem companies have closed since last year. "Now it is small scale, nothing significant," said an Asian diplomat who monitors the trade. "In terms of economic strength, the Khmer Rouge are very shaky, unless they have a lot stored away."

Furthermore, cross-border logging through Khmer Rouge-controlled check-points is expected to be greatly diminished in coming months as the Cambodian government has vowed to end logging exports. "If the government has a policy not to issue logging licenses to Thai companies, the Khmer Rouge logging will finish," said the Asian diplomat. "Thai companies now get export licenses from the Cambodian government for Khmer Rouge logs."

The Cambodian authorities, motivated by kickbacks, issue licenses to Thai companies to take logs from KR border areas, effectively helping finance their enemies.

With an effective clamp down on logging in Khmer Rouge areas, which now allow trucks to cross in from Thailand smuggling other crucial goods to the guerrillas, these supplies would also dry up, say Thai border officials.

Intelligence estimates now put the fighting strength of the Khmer Rouge at between 5,000 and 6,000 regular troops under arms. About 2,000 of them are holed up in remote, sparsely-populated jungles of the far north, with the rest in the mountainous western provinces of Battambang and Pursat. Small pockets of guerrilla fighters - usually numbering less than 100 - remain in numerous jungle outposts in other areas of the country collecting "taxes" at gun point. They are more a minor irritant than a political threat.

Khmer Rouge sources and intelligence officials agree that the faction is suffering from significant ammunition shortages. In recent months Khmer Rouge radio has repeatedly called for villagers and soldiers to produce quotas of "pungi sticks" to defend bases. Analysts say that captured soldiers and defectors complain of ammunition shortages, and the guerrillas are stepping up campaigns to buy supplies from corrupt government commanders.

"It is similar to the situation in 1973 after the peace agreement signed with Vietnam," Pol Pot said in a communique to supporters in 1993. "At that time we were isolated from external support. We had to rely on the people and we had to get our ammunition from the enemy."

But what seems to be the Khmer Rouge's biggest obstacle to survival is their lack of any coherent political program that appeals to the population. Their directives to cadre and radio broadcasts are almost singularly focused on the ridiculous claim that millions of Vietnamese troops and civilians have flooded Cambodia as part of a massive plot by Vietnam to "swallow" Cambodia. But the racist invective - while attempting to appeal to deep strains of racial hostility many Cambodians harbor towards their eastern neighbor - rings particularly hollow in the rural areas of Cambodia where the war is conducted and virtually no Vietnamese have been seen since the Vietnamese army pulled out in 1989.

"Their line on the Vietnamese issue does not fit the reality in many parts of the country, particularly the north and west," says one Cambodian source close to the Khmer Rouge. "Once the people realize there are no Vietnamese, all the DK logic collapses."

"Most of us do not believe that Vietnamese control Cambodia," said former Khmer Rouge regiment commander Tung Yun who defected in January. "When we went to fight we did not see other nationalities. We fought because we were ordered to do so but in our hearts we did not want war anymore."

The Khmer Rouge daily attack the United States, Australia, and France who they say, in collusion with Vietnam, "are waging war against the Cambodian nation and people." But such talk also rings hollow to villagers who see millions of dollars of donor assistance coming in to build roads, healthcare, and other infrastructure development. For most Cambodians now, including many who once sympathized with the Khmer Rouge during the Vietnamese occupation, after 25 years of warfare, destruction, and disastrous political experimentation, there is little motivation to fight and no enemy except those who continue to wage war.

Khmer Rouge attacks late last year in Siem Riep province created 70,000 new refugees from poor rural villages, but most have returned home and vast areas of the province long under guerrilla influence are now with the government. Development workers who had been restricted because of security from many areas for years say that they are getting unprecedented access and security, much provided by former KR soldiers and supporters.

British and French NGO's are clearing thousands of mines from roads and villages. They are followed by UN-supported road building crews, many who employ Khmer Rouge defectors and their families. After the roads are built, other NGO's are entering to repair irrigation systems and provide veterinary health care.

"You can see in Siem Riep that many areas have suddenly opened up," said David Salter, chief project engineer for the International Labor Organization in Siem Riep, whose mandate is to build roads to rural areas. "Because of improved security, access to development has improved. Everyday we employ 1400 people. A lot of those people are defectors or their families. It brings them into the economic life and development process. When they have a job they protect their jobs. When the road gets built the value of their land goes up. When their lives are improved it encourages more defections and security is further improved and more development work can be undertaken."

Last week in Siem Riep town, scores of military officers and officials gathered to celebrate the Cambodian new year. "Together with the Khmer Rouge and the government working together we will build roads, build schools, build happy places," Toan Chhay said in a toast. Scores of drunken former Khmer Rouge and government officers cheered wildly.

In 1988, Pol Pot told his followers that "peace will bring many new complications" and the "enemy will come at us even more strongly, this time flush with money."

Said an ASEAN diplomat with long ties to the Khmer Rouge: "There is no way out now for the Khmer Rouge, they will die slowly."

Said Toan Chhay " I think it will take ten years to get rid of the Khmer Rouge now. Contain them, isolate them, development, development. It is a political strategy."

Publisher's note to readers

Phnom Penh Post

Michael Hayes

(A comment from Phnom Post Editor and Publisher Michael Hayes after the government announced they had filed criminal complaints against him and the paper for an article "Security jitters while the PM's away" charging the paper with "disinformation, incitement and creating insecurity and instability." They demanded to know the names of my sources. The Phnom Penh Post was a courageous and ground breaking factor in emerging expression of peaceful dissent and debating public policy--a concept long unfamiliar to the country.)

Friday, 08 September 1995 14:00

S INCE the announcement by the Ministry of Information (MOI) that a complaint had been lodged against me for an article we ran entitled "Security jitters while PMs away," written by Nate Thayer (PPPost: March 24, l995), our office has received dozens of inquiries from around the world and here in Cambodia on the situation vis-a-vis this case.

For readers who may not have seen any of the various news stories, the situation - in brief - is as follows:

The initial public announcement was made by the MOI on August 24.

According to an MOI spokesman, Leng Sochea, the government has filed a complaint with the municipal court asking them to press criminal charges against me, as publisher of the PPPost, for disinformation, incitement and creating insecurity and instability.

If tried and convicted, I could be fined and possibly jailed. As well, the PPPost could be closed down permanently.

Government lawyer Kao Bun Hong, on behalf of the two Prime Ministers, filed the complaint in a letter dated April 21, although it is not known when the court officially received the letter. A court official has said a judge is investigating the case to decide whether to press charges under Article 62 - dis-information - of the UNTAC Press Law.

Under current Cambodian law the court has six months to review the case and decide whether this or other charges will be brought against me, or none at all.

As a part of the court's investigation into the case I can be called in to answer questions before a final decision is made on prosecution.

To date, I have not been officially notified in writing by the court that the investigation is proceeding or that I will be summoned to answer questions, or whether or not I will be prosecuted.

I'm pleased to note with gratitude that in a faxed response to a letter of concern about this situation from Julio Jeldres, H.M. King Norodom Sihanouk wrote on August 25 that while he could not change the course of the case, His Majesty "shall, however, have the right and the duty to grant an amnesty to the journalists sentenced."

In a meeting I had with Kao Bun Hong on September 2, I was told that the government wanted to know who the unnamed sources were cited in the story.

According to the recently passed press law, which was signed into law by Assembly President and Acting Head of State Chea Sim on August 31, journalists are protected by law from having to reveal their sources.

In the absence of any official written notification on this case from either the government or the court, I have been refraining from making any statements to the press except to say that I stand behind the accuracy of the story in question.

Readers will be kept abreast of any significant developments regarding this case. Many, many, many thanks to all those, both within the RGC and without, who have expressed their support in the last two weeks.

'I'm tired of talking about it'

Excerpts from interview with Pol Pot October 16, 1997

By Nate Thayer

Phnom Penh Post

Friday, 24 October 1997

Pol Pot, in his Oct 16 interview, dodged the big question - his role in mass murder - despite repeated attempts to get a response from him.

Nate Thayer's interpreter, senior KR cadre Tep Kunnal was less than keen on his job, trying to beg out of his translating duties. Thayer prevailed upon Kunnal to stay and translate the questions and answers. The following are excerpts, starting with Thayer's opening questions, addressed to the interpreter:

Q: He knows he is accused of leading and organization that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and that he has been condemned by most of the world for it. Is he a mass murderer, or what has he contributed to his country:

A: I think that you can raise all of the questions at one time, and some questions I think that I can answer connecting one to another to simplify things. But it's up to you...

Q: I'm interested in the issues of the time he was in power between 1975 and 1979. The millions of people who indeed did suffer during that time, and whether he feels that he's fairly accused. That's one question, let's start with.

A:Yes, I want to reply. Your question is not unfamiliar. That question has been raised time and again: I would like to say first that my conscience is clear. Everything I have done and contributed is first for the nation and the people and the race of Cambodia.

[Pol Pot then spoke about how the Vietnamese wanted to take over Cambodia, adding "they wanted to assassinate me because they knew without me they could easily swallow up Cambodia".]

Q: I would like to hear all of that, and if he's willing to stay here for hours, I am too. But if we could please deal with this first. As you know, most of the world thinks that you're responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Cambodians who didn't deserve to suffer. Could you answer that question directly? Do you feel that you were indeed responsible for crimes against humanity, against your own people?

A: I'm going to reply. I want to tell you clearly. First, I would like to tell you that I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people. Even now, and you can look at me, am I savage person? My conscience is clear... As I told you before, they fought against us, so we had to take measures to defend ourselves...

Q: You have an opportunity here, a historical opportunity. You know well that during your years in power, your policies - agrarian experiments, social and political organizations, the direct executions of many thousands of people - that many families suffered. The country itself also suffered because of your policies. Your fellow Cambodians want to know whether you feel any remorse, whether you acknowledge that you made very serious mistakes while you were in power?

A: There are two sides to it, as I told you: There's what we did wrong, and what we did right. The mistake is that we did some things against the people - by us and also by the enemy - but the other side, as I told you, is that without our struggle there would be no Cambodia right now.

Q: But for all those hundreds of thousands who suffered - not just died but suffered from forced labor, from lack of food, from what were clearly failed central policies while you were in power - don't you think that they deserve an apology?

A:For the wrong things of our struggle, as I told you, for the wrong things, it has been written in the book. This is a testimony before history.

Q: Which book?

A:The book is the "The Right and Wrong of Democratic Kampuchea". [Pol Pot was apparently referring to a political tract released by the Democratic Kampuchea movement, as the Khmer Rouge calls themselves, in the late 1980s.]

Q: But that acknowledged only 30,000 deaths. All independent scholars, from all political ideologies, acknowledge a minimum of hundreds of thousands of people who died as a result of failed central policies while you were in power...That is a fact. While you were in sole power-and all the other members of your standing committee say you were in full power-thousands of people died because of failed social policies of your government. Are you willing to acknowledge that fact?

A: As I told you, that was written in the book, and I'm tired of talking about it...

Q: Let's talk about Tuol Sleng. There is overwhelming evidence that you had overall responsibility for Tuol Sleng. Sixteen thousand people who signed confessions were executed, including women and children who were suspected CIA, KGB, Vietnamese agents. Were you responsible for Toul Sleng and do you really believe that those 16,000 - including women and children - were agents of a foreign government?

A:I was at the top. I made only big decisions on big issues. I want to tell you - Tuol Sleng was a Vietnamese exhibition; a journalist wrote that. People talk about Tuol Sleng, Tuol Sleng, Toul Sleng, but when we look at the pictures, the pictures are the same. When I first heard about Tuol Sleng, it was on VOA [Voice of America]. I listened twice. And there are documents talking about someone who did research about the skeletons of the people... They said when you look closely at the skulls, they are smaller than the skulls of the Khmer people.

Q: Are you saying that you never heard of Tuol Sleng before 1979?

A:No, I never heard of it. And those two researchers, they said that those skeletons, they were more than 10 years old.

Q: Sir, let me say that there is overwhelming scientific evidence, overwhelming proof that thousands of people, Cambodians, were executed at Toul Sleng while you were in control of Phnom Penh. There is no dispute among anybody else in the world outside of Anlong Veng, perhaps, that it is true.

The First Year

Friday, 19 July 2002

Phnom Penh Post

It was January 1992. Two men were drinking and talking in their rattan chairs on the verandah of the Renakse Hotel, and invited me over. One of them, Nate, introduced the other to me by saying: "This is Michael. He's going to start the first English-language newspaper in Cambodia."

A few conversations later I found myself in the managing editor's chair of the Phnom Penh Post. I had just moved to Cambodia to work as a stringer for the San Francisco Examiner after finishing the better part of a decade in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, where I had edited the neighborhood newspaper, the Tenderloin Times. The paper was published not only in English but in Khmer, Lao, and Vietnamese to serve the inner city's booming refugee population.

By abandoning the uncertainties of freelance journalism for the even more risky undertaking of helping to start up a newspaper in Cambodia, I joined a team of three: Michael, Kathleen, and Chap Narith. Despite the scarcity of staff persons on the masthead, there was plenty of support around town for the newspaper in the early days.

It seemed that just about everyone wanted to get something published in the first issue, with several of the local hacks competing for who was going to pen the gossip column, now institutionalized as The Gecko. Soon enough the Post was able to hire some reporters, with some of Cambodia's best journalists coming on board that first year, including Mang Channo, Moeun Chhean Nariddh, and Ker Munthit.

This was Cambodia before its first national elections, before the blossoming of an independent press, before a quarter-million refugees had been repatriated from Thai refugee camps. It was a place where you couldn't count on having electricity every day, even in Phnom Penh; where curfews were often imposed in the city at night, and where you took a chance of soldiers leveling their rifle or rocket launcher at you if didn't slow down for a checkpoint on the provincial highways.

International relief workers had only recently moved their offices from cramped quarters in the Monorom and Samaki (Le Royal) hotels to individual villas in Boeung Keng Kang. No one had mobile phones and getting through on a landline was difficult. The option was often a "human phone call": one visit to set up an appointment with a source and a second one to conduct the actual interview. Sending an international fax was problematic; email non-existent.

Putting out the first issue of the Post was very, very difficult. After Michael found an office for the Post, monks from Wat Botum were asked to come bless the newspaper and new offices. Shortly after the robed ones flicked holy water over all the new computer equipment one of us-I won't say who-mistakenly plugged the laser printer into the wrong voltage, destroying it.

A new printer-and stories-arrived just in time for us to publish the first edition in advance of our main competition, the Cambodia Times, making the Post Cambodia's first English-language paper to publish since 1975.

Setbacks that seemed huge at the time-brownouts and blackouts, equipment failures, bureaucratic obstacles in getting government approval to publish-were soon but dim memories as we slogged through rubber deadlines and all-night production binges.

Like many, I have a visceral memory of those first days and nights at the Post: the generator chanka-chanking away 23 hours a day, the noise ricocheting up the concrete stairway of the office to fill the entire building-and our crania-with sound; working during the peak of the hot season with the windows closed to keep the racket out and the smoke from several chain smokers in.

Newsgathering got only slightly easier after UNTAC arrived. Our press passes entitled us to ride the UN's Russian helicopters and C-130 transport planes for free, enabling day trips to Preah Vihear or Koh Nhek, but few of us traveled after dark if we could help it. Journalists gathered for press conferences by Khmer Rouge officials at the compound next to the Palace (now the site of Kantha Bopha hospital), or for UNTAC spokesperson Eric Fault's noon-time briefings, where UPI reporter Sue Downey pecked furiously away on her laptop as others dozed off their hangovers.

In the evenings the draw for journalists and UN workers was the No Problem Café or the Gecko Bar. This was Phnom Penh before the FCC and the Lucky Market; a time when the city's present-day restaurant district across the "Japanese Bridge" was a deserted muddy strip, accessible only by boat because the bridge was still shattered from a sapper raid during the war.

This was a time when the Post's offices housed not only computers, desks, and filing cabinets but also some of the paper's most important contributors and sources. Nate Thayer lived there, as did Michael, Kathleen, and Steve Heder. Foreign war correspondents from other eras often slung hammocks on the roof when they came to town, along with Montagnard leaders from North Carolina, who had come to meet FULRO fighters who had surrendered to the UN in Mondolkiri. Coming to work some mornings I'd see Khmer Rouge cadre squatting in the front yard of the office, waiting to talk to Nate. While Cambodia-and the Phnom Penh Post-have both changed dramatically in the last decade, the reckless but gutsy vision that gave birth to the paper still remains. Let's hope that the Post remains among the vanguard of the country's press scene for another ten years.

Sara worked at the Post in 1992 as the paper's first managing editor. She is now a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch.

Ta Mok, the movement's strongman, vows to fight on, and blames his longtime comrade-in-arms for the Khmer Rouge's desperate plight. "It is good that Pol Pot is dead. I feel no sorrow," he says. Then he levels a bizarre accusation against the rabidly nationalistic mass murderer: "Pol Pot was a Vietnamese agent. I have the documents."

A young Khmer Rouge fighter, his leaders only metres away, leans close to a visiting reporter and whispers in Khmer: "This movement is finished. Can you get me to America?"

Besieged in dense jungles along the Thai border, the remnants of the Khmer Rouge are battling for survival in the wake of three weeks of chaotic defections and the loss of their northern stronghold of Anlong Veng. Having lost faith in the harsh leadership of Ta Mok, several commanders are negotiating to defect to the guerrilla forces loyal to deposed Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh.

Ta Mok's growing paranoia and isolation were only some of the revelations to come out of an exclusive tour of shrinking Khmer Rouge-held territory north of Anlong Veng the day after Pol Pot's death. Khmer Rouge cadres and Pol Pot's wife recounted the last, ignominious days of his life, as he was moved through the jungle to escape advancing troops.

There was no visible evidence that the former Cambodian dictator was murdered. Cadres say he died of a heart attack on the night of April 15. In the days after his death, Khmer Rouge envoys held secret peace talks in Bangkok with Cambodian Defence Minister Tea Banh, and had their first direct contact with U.S. officials in more than two decades. Yet at the same time, Khmer Rouge holdouts were joining up with Ranariddh's rebel forces, making it likely that the insurgency will continue as Cambodia prepares for crucial elections in July.

The Khmer Rouge weren't trying to expose their shaky future when they allowed a REVIEW reporter to enter their territory, but to prove to the world that the architect of Cambodia's killing fields was indeed dead. Leading the way to Pol Pot's house to display the ultimate proof, a cadre warns against stepping off the path. "Be careful, there are mines everywhere."

The sickly-sweet stench of death fills the wooden hut. Fourteen hours have passed since Pol Pot's demise, and his body is decomposing in the tropical heat. His face and fingers are covered with purple blotches.

Khmer Rouge leaders insist that Pol Pot, aged 73, died of natural causes. Already visibly ill and professing to be near death when interviewed by the REVIEW in October, he had been weakened by a shortage of food and the strain of being moved around to escape the government offensive. "Pol Pot died of heart failure," Ta Mok says. "I did not kill him."

That night, Ta Mok had wanted to move Pol Pot to another house for security reasons. "He was sitting in his chair waiting for the car to come. But he felt tired. Pol Pot's wife asked him to take a rest. He lay down in his bed. His wife heard a gasp of air. It was the sound of dying. When she touched him he had passed away already. It was at 10:15 last night."

There are no signs of foul play, but Pol Pot has a pained expression on his face, as if he did not die peacefully. One eye is shut and the other half open. Cotton balls are stuffed up his nostrils to prevent leakage of body fluids. By his body lie his rattan fan, blue-and-red peasant scarf, bamboo cane and white plastic sandals. His books and other possessions have been confiscated since he was ousted by his comrades in an internal power struggle 10 months earlier. Two vases of purple bougainvillea stand at the head of the bed. Otherwise, the room is empty, save for a small short-wave radio.

Pol Pot listened religiously to Voice of America broadcasts on that radio, but the April 15 news on the Khmer-language service may have been too much to bear. The lead story was the REVIEW's report that Khmer Rouge leaders--desperate for food, medicine and international support--had decided to turn him over to an international tribunal to face trial for crimes against humanity. "He listened to VOA every night, and VOA on Wednesday reported your story at 8 p.m. that he would be turned over to an international court," says Gen. Khem Nuon, the Khmer Rouge army chief-of-staff. "We thought the shock of him hearing this on VOA might have killed him."

A week earlier, Nuon had said that Pol Pot knew of the decision, but now he says the ageing leader had not been fully informed. "We decided clearly to send him" to an international court, says Nuon, "but we only told him that we were in a very difficult situation and perhaps it was better that he go abroad. Tears came to his eyes when I told him that."

Perched nervously by the deathbed is Pol Pot's wife, a 40-year-old former ammunition porter for the Khmer Rouge named Muon. Clutching her hand is their 12-year-old daughter, Mul. A peasant woman, Muon says she has never laid eyes on a Westerner before. She corroborates Ta Mok's account of Pol Pot's death. "Last night, he said he felt dizzy. I asked him to lie down. I heard him make a noise. When I went to touch him, he had died."

Pol Pot married her after his first wife went insane in the 1980s as the Khmer Rouge tried to survive in the jungle after their reign of terror was ended by invading Vietnamese troops. Muon seems oblivious to her husband's bloodstained past, caught only in the anguish of the present.

"He told me a few weeks ago: 'My father died at 73. I am 73 now. My time is not far away,'" she says. "It was a way of telling me that he was preparing to die." Reaching down to caress his face, she bursts into tears. "He was always a good husband. He tried his best to educate the children not to be traitors. Since I married him in 1985, I never saw him do a bad thing."

Asked about his reputation as a mass-murderer, her lips quiver and she casts a terrified glance at senior Khmer Rouge cadres hovering nearby. "I know nothing about politics," she says. "It is up to history to judge. That is all I want to say."

She has reason to be terrified. "As to what I will do with his family, I haven't decided," says Ta Mok. "If I let them go, will they say anything bad about me? Maybe they might be used by Hun Sen," he says, referring to his nemesis, the Cambodian premier.

Outside the front door is a small vegetable garden tended by Pol Pot's wife and daughter; next to it, a freshly dug trench where Pol Pot and his family were forced to cower as artillery bombarded the jungle redoubt in recent weeks.

Pol Pot's last days were spent in flight and fear of capture--a humiliating end for the man who ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. According to his wife and Khmer Rouge leaders, he dyed his hair black on April 10 in a desperate attempt to avoid capture by mutinying Khmer Rouge troops as he fled to the Dongrek mountains north of Anlong Veng. "Pol Pot feared that he could be caught. By dying his hair he was trying to disguise himself. For such a person to do that, it showed real fear in his mind," says Gen. Nuon.

The guerrillas had been unable to provide their ousted leader with sufficient food since being forced from their headquarters in late March. "For the last few weeks he had diarrhoea and we haven't had much food because of the fighting with the traitors," recounts Ta Mok.

As Pol Pot fled, the remnants of the movement he created 38 years ago crumbled before his eyes. A few days before his death, he was being driven with his wife and daughter to a new hideout by Gen. Non Nou, his personal guard. From his blue Toyota Land Cruiser, Pol Pot saw Khmer Rouge civilians--cadres say around 30,000--who had been forced from their fields and villages by government troops and Khmer Rouge defectors.

"When he saw the peasants and our cadres lying by the side of the road with no food or shelter, he broke down into tears," says Non Nou. His wife echoes the account, and quotes Pol Pot as saying: "My only wish is that Cambodians stay united so that Vietnam will not swallow our country." Pol Pot never expressed any regrets, she says. "What I would like the world to know was that he was a good man, a patriot, a good father."

Asked how she wanted her father remembered, Pol Pot's only child stands with her head bowed, eyes downcast and filled with tears. "Now my daughter is not able to say anything," interjects Muon. "I think she will let history judge her father."

History will have to, because death has deprived the world of the chance to judge the man responsible for the deaths of more than 1 million people.

Although Pol Pot has cheated justice, other leaders of that regime remain at large, including Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, who are sheltering with Ta Mok. Others, such as Keo Pok, Mam Nay and Pol Pot's former brother-in-law, Ieng Sary, have defected with their troops to the government side since 1996.

Although Pol Pot's life will stand as the darkest chapter in Cambodian history, his death is likely to be just a historical footnote. What's more likely to affect Cambodia's future is the continuing disintegration of the Khmer Rouge. This is prompting desperate attempts by what's left of the movement to find security.

The day after Pol Pot died, senior Khmer Rouge officials travelled to Bangkok, where they held secret negotiations with Cambodian Defence Minister Tea Banh. There, they offered for the first time to cooperate with elements of the Cambodian government. "Yes, we are prepared to negotiate. We are in the process," says Ta Mok. "But I am not going to be a running dog of Vietnam like Ieng Sary. In a nutshell, we want to dissolve the Hun Sen government and establish a national government that includes all national forces."

Interviewed on April 18, one of the chief Khmer Rouge negotiators, Cor Bun Heng, said of the unprecedented meeting: "It was a good beginning and cordial. But these things take time." Added the other senior negotiator, Gen. Nuon: "We believe that the only way out is national reconciliation between all the parties. We know that the entire Cambodian population wants peace."

What's more, Nuon and Cor Bun Heng said they met secretly on April 17 with American officials in Bangkok, and laid out their demands for a political settlement. It was the first official, direct contact between the United States and the Khmer Rouge for at least two decades. U.S. officials wouldn't comment.

In the jungles, Ta Mok knows that his capture and trial is sought by the international community. He wants to use Pol Pot's death to wipe the slate clean. "The world community should stop talking about this now that Pol Pot is dead. It was all Pol Pot. He annihilated many good cadres and destroyed our movement. I hope he suffers after death," he says. He then asks a visiting reporter to get hold of a satellite telephone for him, sketching a collapsible phone he has seen. "I want a good telephone. One that I can call anywhere in the world."

But working the phone will not prevent Ta Mok from rapidly losing the loyalty of his own commanders. Privately, many of his top officers and cadres hold him responsible for the collapse of the movement since he seized control from Pol Pot last July. "He is very tired," says a senior Khmer Rouge official. "No man can shoulder all the political, diplomatic and military burdens by himself." Others are less kind. "He has no more support from many of his own people," whispers one cadre. "But we don't know where to go. Cambodia has no good leaders."

Fear was in the faces of many leaders and cadres still holed up near the Thai border--and for good reason. "There may be more traitors, it is normal. But in the end they will all die," Ta Mok says. He's a man of his word: Three top commanders arrested with Pol Pot last year were executed in late March because some of the fighters who mutinied were loyal to them. "It was a decision made by the people," Ta Mok shrugs.

He gives the impression of being increasingly out of touch with reality, seeing enemies everywhere and unwilling to compromise. His brutal tactics are also a source of unease among his remaining loyalists. "Our movement will only get stronger. We have sent our forces close to Phnom Penh and they have carried out their tasks successfully," he says. The "task" he boasts of was the recent massacre of 22 ethnic Vietnamese, including women and children, in a fishing village in Kompong Chhnang province.

The REVIEW has learned that many of the estimated 1,600 guerrillas still nominally under Ta Mok's command have pledged allegiance to the forces loyal to Ranariddh's Funcinpec party, who occupy nearby jungles. Cadres say that in negotiations with Funcinpec's Gen. Nyek Bun Chhay, they have pledged loyalty to Ranariddh's party and agreed to force Ta Mok into "retirement."

This presents a political dilemma for Ranariddh. He has pledged to abide by a Japanese peace plan that aims to create conditions for Funcinpec to campaign freely ahead of the July elections--something Hun Sen has resisted. The Japanese plan specifically calls for the severing of links between Funcinpec troops and Ta Mok's guerrillas. For the moment, Ranariddh is choosing denial. "I do not have any cooperative relations with the Khmer Rouge," he said on April 17. "Rumours currently circulating to the effect that forces loyal to me are supporting the Khmer Rouge forces in Anlong Veng are not true."

That's not the only obstacle facing Japan and Asean as they try to find a formula that would allow Ranariddh to return home to campaign for the polls. The job was already hard enough for the Thai, Philippine and Indonesian foreign ministers who met King Norodom Sihanouk in Siem Riep in mid-April. But then Sihanouk made it harder by telling them Ranariddh should pull out of the elections--and Cambodian politics altogether--and instead prepare to be king, according to furious Funcinpec members.

Meanwhile, Cambodia's neighbours are becoming increasingly exasperated by the seemingly endless war. Interviewed in Bangkok, Thai Foreign Minister Surin Pitsuwan expresses optimism that elections could be held in Cambodia, but also voices a warning. "Without a resolution to the Cambodian conflict, the region is being perceived as insecure, unstable. That prevents further cooperation and development for Asia," he says, pointing to plans to develop the Mekong basin that are now delicately poised.

China, previously hesitant about taking part in the Mekong's development, is now willing to participate, Surin says. That means that Cambodia, at the heart of the Mekong Basin, is now the major remaining obstacle. "The region is being denied this development by the existing Cambodian conflict," says Surin. "Certainly, there is a sense of Cambodia fatigue in the international community. Cambodians should realize that."

November 07, 2011

A non-standard view of the 'coup'

Phnom Penh Post

Friday, 29 August 1997

Michael Vickery, associate professor of history at Universiti Sains Malaysia, condemns journalists' coverage of the recent fighting in Phnom Penh, and the Pol Pot trial.

BACK in 1993 it was said that journalists swarmed into town hoping to see blood, and left disappointed. Now they have seen some blood, and they certainly know what to do with it - grease their own personal Vietnam syndromes by kicking a Cambodian leadership which, like Vietnam, has refused to kowtow.

'Strong Man' Hun Sen, they say, moved to wipe out his opposition because he feared the results of next year's election. UNTAC's $2 billion was wasted, because it didn't buy compliance with what the West wanted in Cambodia. Those FUNCINPEC figures who chose Hun Sen over Ranariddh are 'quislings', although when they returned to Cambodia after 1991 they were hailed as the best elements of FUNCINPEC, as they no doubt are.

Totally ignored is the build-up to the events of July 5-6. Although journalists cannot always be historians and sociologists, they must pay some attention or their simple-minded recording of the 'facts' of the moment (always partial because choices must be made, and therefore inevitably partisan) leads them into gross misinterpretations, not to say disinformation.

No doubt for journalists the 1980s are such ancient history that they cannot be accused of bias for forgetting them. All Cambodian political figures, however, know, and do not forget, that the entire so-called peace process evolution was intended to get rid of the CPP, even at the risk of giving the Khmer Rouge a place in the government. The Paris Agreement and the 1993 election only came about because the People's Republic of Kampuchea/State of Cambodia (PRK/SOC) managed to defeat cruder schemes. And in spite of $2 billion and a whole gaggle of experts, the conduct of balloting and counting was sloppy enough to give the CPP reason to claim fraud.

It is, however, disinformation just to say that Ranariddh won but Hun Sen refused to move out. Representation was proportional and the coalition was mandated by Paris and UNTAC rules concerning the new Constitution. The modalities of forming the coalition, of course, were not parliamentary, but the position retained by the CPP was in accord with its votes, 38% against 45%. This is the minimum background

It was disinformation not to at least acknowledge in passing that weeks ago Ranariddh boasted that he would use new KR allies to further his own policies, especially and most dangerously, against Vietnam. It was disinformation not to note that ever since 1993 the royalists had been plotting to undermine Hun Sen as much as he, no doubt, had been plotting to stay ahead of them. The post-election secession was under Ranariddh's brother Chakrapong, just dumped by the CPP, and directly instigated by an important non-CPP higher-level personality. Hun Sen outplayed them and got credit for putting down the secession. All through 1994 various royalist schemes were hatched to undermine the CPP by bringing the KR into the government via a back door; and in July of that year a royalist coup was barely nipped in the bud.

The royalists, moreover, seem to have got what they asked for. As said in the CPP White Paper edited by a US legal expert, and as supported in Mike Fowler's presentation of the case (PPP 12-24 July 1997), the royalists had been trying to provoke such an incident, apparently overconfident of success, and Hun Sen had a good legal case against them, if only he had resorted to the courts rather than to violence. I wonder what courts he could have used. The Phnom Penh foreign community and the international press have already condemned the Cambodian courts as nothing but rubber stamps for the government, and they would have denounced any verdict in Hun Sen's favor as dishonest; and probably no international court would have taken the case.

Incidentally, the White Paper remarks were already widely held among serious diplomats during my last visit to Phnom Penh in December 1996.

Of course, we should all rejoice in the overthrow of Pol Pot by Nate Thayer and the emergence of the Khmer Rouge as born again liberal democrats. Nate, a volunteer PR man for the Khmer Rouge since, at least, his "Cambodia: Misperceptions and Peace" (Washington Quarterly, Spring 1991) has outdone himself with "Cambodia's Peace was Just a Day Away" in the Washington Post on August 17 [a version of which was published as "Secret talks lead to final purge" in the last PP Post]. Going beyond the usual PR, it is the most devious and dishonest piece of pseudo-journalism I have seen in a long time.

In order to present the scene as "a watershed moment" which would have meant peace for "this country's tortured history" (a cliché usual among hacks apologizing for the torturers) Nate talks about the KR abandoning "their war against Cambodia's government" and agreeing "to a formal 'surrender' ceremony in which their forces would join the Cambodian army".

That is straight Nate PR hype. In the finer print further on the KR themselves, at least, appear more honest.

In his Far Eastern Economic Review special (7 Aug) Nate was less devious with, "the Khmer Rouge finalized their alliance with Ranariddh's FUNCINPEC party on July 4", after negotiations between Ta Mok and FUNCINPEC general Nhek Bun Chhay in which the KR "agreed in principle to join in alliance [with FUNCINPEC]".

In the Washington Post, Nate put a different spin on the story, "the guerrillas finally had agreed to integrate their troops into the army [sic] and recognize the government". Nate deviously substituted 'the government' for 'FUNCINPEC' and its armed faction for 'the army'.

However, further on, Nate says that the KR were adamantly opposed to working with Hun Sen, whom they kept calling a puppet, and what they agreed to was not integrating forces and joining the government, but only that "the military units changed into government uniforms and pledged allegiance to the king, the government and the constitution, but were not forced to disperse from their territory". They would keep their own strategic base in Anlong Veng. Similarly it was agreed, not that the KR would join with the government, but "could join the National United Front coalition of anti-Hun Sen political opposition parties".

It was precisely what Hun Sen claimed, a FUNCINPEC-KR alliance against him, along with delivery of weapons and ammunition by FUNCINPEC to the KR.

It is thus egregious to say that only now, after Hun Sen's coup, "the forces loyal to Ranariddh have begun to form a military coalition with former Khmer Rouge fighters". That was what they had agreed to on July 4.

Not only would the Ranariddh-KR coalition not have brought peace to Cambodia, it could have embroiled Vietnam as well, for reports of KR radio broadcasts indicate that nothing of their traditional policy has changed. Hatred of Vietnam as the main enemy continues; and several weeks ago Ranariddh boasted of using defecting KR in his own anti-Vietnamese plans.

The Pol Pot trial scam shows again that the KR, as I wrote in 1991 (Indochina Issues) are adroit at winning the hearts and minds of the western press corps. As Thayer wrote, Tep Kunnal, a new KR front man, "is knowledgeable about US politics". The scam has some chance of success because for various reasons all opponents of Democratic Kampuchea have personalized its record with the name Pol Pot, ignoring that what happened in 1975-79 could not have been the work of one man, but was influenced by Cambodia's history and the structure of its society.

For Vietnam and the new PRK state in 1979, it was simply the easiest way to quickly assure the demonization of their enemies; for other Cambodians it was a way to avoid examination and self-criticism of their own society; for concerned western regimes it was a way to escape from their own responsibility in the destruction of Cambodia; and for academic specialists, at least in English-speaking milieus, concentration on personalities rather than social and economic structures was an ingrained habit in their work. Thus both among the Cambodian population and western observers 'Pol Potism' as an aberration of one evil man, or at most a small coterie, replaced 'Democratic Kampuchea', which should have been viewed as an unfortunate episode in Cambodia's integration into the modern world requiring close study and explanation in its totality.

Contrary to Thayer's hype, a number of persons who viewed the film, including both Cambodians and foreigners, and one leading Cambodia scholar, did not think Pol Pot appeared tearful or contrite, and at the end he was shown considerable deference by his 'accusers'. The audience was mostly women and children chanting slogans; key leaders - Ta Mok, Khieu Samphan, and Nuon Chea - were not present; Thayer could not (whether for linguistic or political reasons is not clear) ask Pol Pot any questions, and he simply reproduced what he was told by the directors and producers of the show concerning the alleged splits in the KR. Even then it is clear that not much is new. Peasantism and nationalism are still the KR themes, as they always were, and now they claim to be for liberal democracy and the free market.

So, one might ask, and this is indeed what they want us to ask, what is wrong with a KR-royalist alliance based on peasant welfare, nationalism and the free market?

For one thing, we have seen much of it before. Their policies were always in principle pro-peasant, yet they severely damaged peasant livelihood. Now, with a small population dependent on them, and vast wealth from timber sales over the years, it is easy to subsidize their way into popularity among those peasants. This gives no clue to what they would do in agriculture if they again controlled the country, or whether they have learned the requisite lessons from their previous experience. So far, their free market activity has meant stealing the national forests and selling them across the border, and if this is what Cambodia has to hope from them, the country might just as well stick with its current rulers. As for their commitment to liberal democracy, I think we may fairly disbelieve.

Moreover, in a poor country with an overwhelming majority of poor peasants in its population, a free market and liberal democracy work counter to peasant welfare, as may be seen from several examples in the real world.

As for nationalism, that means aggravated hatred of Vietnam, which was probably the single most destructive element of DK policies, and the motive for most of the officially sanctioned executions.

Those Phnom Penh diplomats who last December indicated that their worry for next year was an unholy alliance of Ranariddh, Rainsy and the Khmer Rouge which might do well in the election on a platform of anti-Vietnamese chauvinism were correct, and if Hun Sen has averted that we should all be pleased.

Nate Thayer, however, has put his finger on certain matters which deserve attention. Unlike those journalists who just want to see blood in Phnom Penh, and who time and again reserve their worst invective, not for the real KR, but for Hun Sen because once upon a time, before 1977, he was in the Khmer Rouge army, and unlike the western statesmen who throughout the 1980s publicly excoriated the KR while facilitating backhanders to them across the Thai border, Thayer believes in what he promotes. He sees that most of Cambodia's population, who are poor peasants, live in misery, ignored by most of their political and economic rulers. And Thayer thinks that what he sees as the new reformed KR may have some of the right answers.

At least, the Phnom Penh government and the interested foreign organizations should be giving serious attention to the social problems of large impoverished groups in the Cambodian population, including peasants, the urban mass, and the soldiers. In the events of July 5-6 there were disturbing reminders of April 1975. As reported by Robin McDowell of AP on 7 July, "Doctors at one hospital said patients were being discharged early to go home to protect their belongings. At another, struck by shelling over the weekend, doctors had abandoned their patients. By today, all the hospital's mattresses, furniture and equipment had been looted". Let us not forget that one of the reasons for the dispersal of hospitals by the victorious KR was because over half of Cambodia's doctors had fled the country before 17 April.

The looting which accompanied the coup was not in order to reward the troops. Quite obviously it could not be controlled, and civilians were involved as enthusiastically as soldiers. It showed a violent hatred by the poor, both soldiers and civilians, against the small privileged sector which has become indecently and pretentiously rich since 1991.

The Khmer Rouge won in 1975 because they had the support of those poor sectors of Cambodia, and Phnom Penh as a city, abstracting from the fate of particular individuals, deserved what happened in April 1975. The events of July 5-6, indicate that it might all happen again, whether or not Pol Pot has been put away, and whether or not the Khmer Rouge have reformed. Indeed, if a KR-royalist alliance should win an election, and put into effect the liberal democracy and free market they now praise, they might in the end find themselves victims of popular rage from out of the depths. After the anti-Vietnamese chauvinism which seems to be growing, what most worries me is that all factions, the KR, the royalists, the CPP, and the prominent dissident Pen Sovann, have been touting the same economic doctrines, which in the former Soviet Union have led, since 1991, to the realization of the old Cold War cliché about regimes making war on their own people.

Coup debate 111

Friday, 23 September 1994

Letter to the Editor

Phnom Penh Post

Unfortunately, Chris Horwood, in his entirely justifiable 'attack' on Phnom Penh Post (3/17, 26 Aug-8 Sept, p.9), did not say enough, and did not say it right, permitting Nate Thayer to respond disingenuously, further misleading PPP readers - not the first time this has happened. The question is not whether Chakrapong and Sin Song were guilty, or whether Thayer thinks they were innocent. What comes through in Thayer's report is that he is more sympathetic to them than to the government, even if they were guilty. The purpose behind Thayer's article was to discredit the CPP, and this was also the purpose of his interview with Sar Kheng, which he mischievously, brought up as a balance against his coverage of Chakrapong.

Questions? Thayer's first sentences expressed disbelief in the government line on the "alleged coup", 'reporting', without the slightest evidence, that it involved "at the least .. powerful elements of the security forces", an attribution which excludes both Chak-rapong and Sin Song. The first sentence in his second paragraph, that " more questions were raised than answered by the govern-ment's explanation", was also without evidence other than his own speculations, and a dishonest swipe at the government. And, the coup "has exposed a traumatic - and dangerous - split in the Cambodian people's Party", again without explanation to enlighten PPP readers. Need I go on ? Virtually every paragraph, if not every sentence, contains an editorial; and I would have no objection in principle, although I might still argue against Thayer's reasoning, if his piece had been presented as a PPP editorial, or Op-Ed, but not as front-page news.

As news it was impermissible to speculate that "the coup was organized at the highest level by dominant figures within the CPP", and sourcing to "some intelligence analysts and government officials" is without value, particularly after Thayer had named government officials with a variety of opinions. Equally slippery was to suggest it was because the CPP "are unused to dispute or dissent", as though they were the only Cambodian faction with that weakness.

One point neglected by Thayer is equally revealing of his purpose. Nowhere in his front page article, nor even in the page 8 article which directly touched on the subject, did he mention that Chakrapong and Sin Song have been sulking for months because they were dropped from the CPP lists of victorious election candidates in May 1993 and have been trying ever since to regain seats in the National Assembly.

What Thayer did say about the events of May-June last year is even more shady than his speculations about the coup this July, and the disingenuosness goes right to the 'highest level' of PPP editorship. Thayer says that the June 1993 secession led by Chakrapong and Sin Song, following their dismissal by the CPP, "had the covert backing of their Cambodian People's Party leaders - including Hun Sen, Chea Sim, and Sar Kheng". This is the umpteenth time Thayer has written this, without, so far as I have seen, presenting any evidence. The accusation in fact goes back to a confidential analysis by Stephen Heder under his Untac cover, and it had to be confidential because it was so lacking in substance. At the time I prepared a counter analysis, distributed on June 24-25 1993 to PPP and to other journalists, Embassies and Untac offices.

Thayer has ignored the counter argument, and his employers allow him to get away with it, thereby misleading readers like Horwood, who know no better than to repeat with Thayer that the "secession movement.. played a vital role in forcing Funcinpec to accept a greater involvement in government of the defeated CPP".

On this subject Thayer, supported by Michael Hayes, has been exercising self-censorship every time he puts pen to paper.